by Bettyrose Woody ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 25, 2017
A painful, sad, and disturbing story of survival with an unexpected final touch of forgiveness.
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Woody, in her debut memoir, tells of being raised by a cruel mother and making peace with her chaotic past.
By the time she was 3, the author writes, she “had built a protective shell around myself to shut life out.…I conditioned myself to never express emotion or react to anything, good or bad.” She did this, she says, to deny her abusive mother the gratification of seeing the fear she instilled in her children. This ability also enabled the author to move forward in her adult life despite terrible trauma. Her mother, she says, beat and verbally abused her and her seven siblings, once saying to the author, “You were meant to live a hell on earth, and that’s my job, to make sure you do.” At one point, Woody recalls a series of chilling incidents during a hot July day in Cincinnati in the late 1960s, when she was 11. She left her home, where her mother was raging at her sister Janie, and walked down the street, where she ran into an older teenage boy who offered her a ride to her father’s house (her parents were separated). Instead, the boy brought her to his own parents’ house, where he raped her; later that night, she says, she was raped again, by a different man. The following year, she recalls, her mother had her placed in the Alton State Mental Hospital in Illinois, where she remained for two years, until she ran away. Over the course of this book, Woody’s narrative is revealed in scattered bits and pieces, often switching between the past and the present. Her evaluations of her mother, including that she “suffered from narcissistic personality disorder,” start to feel repetitious. At times, this rambling account feels as if the author is mainly trying to achieve personal catharsis by setting her experiences down on the page. However, readers will also find an indomitable spirit at the heart of this story as well as an impressive capacity to offer unqualified love to others.
A painful, sad, and disturbing story of survival with an unexpected final touch of forgiveness.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5463-7618-7
Page Count: 162
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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