Engrossing and identifiable.
A young teen at a Hawaiian military school near the end of World War II contemplates his future in Fernandez’s (Kaua’i Kids in Peace and War, 2013, etc.) autobiographical series.
After retiring in California, Fernandez’s father sent his 14-year-old, Hawaii-born son to military school in Honolulu. It was 1944, when the world was still at war. But even once the war was over, Hawaii remained at unrest: a labor union—on hold due to implementation of martial law—launched a workers’ strike, while a tsunami hit Kauai and Hilo. Fernandez, who’d experienced racism in Hawaii, toured the mainland U.S. with his family and found a nation with unbridled prejudices and discrimination. His father wanted him to study to be a lawyer, leaving Fernandez, who feared Hawaiians might have no future in their homeland, to consider his options. The author’s memoir is a riveting account of his experience in a world in disarray, both during and after the war. WWII is aptly displayed, particularly the pervasive fear of nuclear weapons as well as the worry of communists infiltrating America. But what makes the grandest impression is the more personal side of the narrative. Fernandez, for example, is Portuguese-Hawaiian, but his brown skin and surname lead some to mistake him for a Mexican, mistreating him accordingly. Similarly, his family witnessed a hotel clerk reject service for a Jewish couple after seeing the man’s last name. In Tennessee, Fernandez had to stop and think about which of the segregated restrooms he could use, while the situation in Mexico proved equally appalling: just the lighter-skinned citizens, it seems, had jobs or money. Particularly regaling are Fernandez’s descriptions of beaches surrounded by barbed-wire fences and fishing near the shore. Readers will be especially intrigued by events that brought Fernandez to his transformative decision to attend Stanford University.
Engrossing and identifiable.Pub Date: May 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5058-8199-8
Page Count: 228
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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