Despite the often grim developments, energetic and upbeat reportage from the parental frontlines.
Unabashedly emotional, at times cloyingly cute memoir of how Chinese-American actor Wong and his partner became parents.
Composed mostly of e-mail the author sent and received, the narrative also includes baby Jackson’s imagined recollections (more mawkish than moving) of his birth and early days. Beginning with the premature arrival of Jackson and his short-lived twin, Boaz, Wong describes the first anxious hours and the roller-coaster days that followed as Boaz died and Jackson struggled to survive. In addition to a nail-biting account of the ordeal that ended when he was finally able to take Jackson home, the author also provides a tribute to his Chinese-American family in San Francisco and an account of an increasingly common but still controversial form of parenthood. In the late 1990s, Wong and long-time partner Richie, deciding that they wanted a child who would share their Chinese and Jewish heritages, began researching the options. Through a California agency they found a surrogate mother, Shauna, who already had two children. Richie’s sister, also already a mother, was prepared to donate eggs, while Wong would provide the sperm for in-vitro fertilization. The embryos were successfully implanted, but Shauna went into early labor, and the babies were born in May instead of August. Boaz, fatally anemic, died within hours. Jackson survived, but his lungs were immature and his colon blocked; he had to be flown by chartered plane to another hospital for more specialized care. As Wong relates his emotions, his worries, and the struggles to fulfill his professional obligations on both coasts, he also lovingly details his family’s support. The e-mails from sympathizers, friends, family, and colleagues, however personally affecting and helpful they were, pad the text rather than inform it.
Despite the often grim developments, energetic and upbeat reportage from the parental frontlines.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052953-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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