A heartbreaking tribute to a couple’s true love.
A devoted widower relates his life with his beloved of 41 years in this memoir.
As a young Indian man coming of age in 1970s South Africa, all Luckan (Love Is All There Is, 2015) wanted to do was play music, until one day, while walking home from college, he spotted two young girls struggling to carry a box up the road to their house. His eyes met those of the eldest, he writes, and he felt a rush of emotion. However, when he later ran into her at a local shop, it took some convincing for her to tell him her name. It was Mamata, but she said that she preferred to be called “Baby.” The two soon became inseparable and remained so for decades. Their road to happiness, though, was rocky; Baby, he writes, came from an impoverished, abusive background, and Luckan’s parents disapproved of their son dating a girl from a different caste. The two married when Baby was only 16; both were certain that nothing could break their bond, and they were determined to show their families that they were committed. They ended up living in their car and struggled for a long time; Baby experienced multiple miscarriages and a stillborn birth before the couple finally had a roof over their heads. As time passed, they eventually found relief from poverty and soon had two healthy children, which helped heal the wounds they’d suffered. But hardships kept coming, and the couple became suicidal, with only their promises to each other pulling them back from the precipice. The author goes on to tell of how their dedication propelled them forward, and how many joyous years passed before the two faced their final battle against the world together. Throughout this book, Luckan seizes every opportunity to espouse his love for Baby, whom he calls his “lotus.” Although the book is often sentimental, it effectively shows that the tragedies that the couple endured provided them with the fervent emotion they needed to keep going. When the author relates stories of hard times, his passion rings fierce and true, and his pain is devastating to behold. By the final pages, readers will feel the full weight of a hard but love-filled life.
A heartbreaking tribute to a couple’s true love.Pub Date: July 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4828-0860-5
Page Count: 206
Publisher: PartridgeAfrica
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 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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