by Bonnie L. Collins ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 7, 2012
The heart-rending effects of change laid bare.
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An insightful memoir that traces a teenage girl’s adjustment to her father’s sudden death.
Collins was a teenager growing up in Central Pennsylvania when her “safe and secure” world irrevocably changed. As she recalls in her moving, sharply observed memoir, she had just come home from school when she learned her father had died of a heart attack at the age of 47. “Life without my dad was unimaginable,” she says. Collins recalls how her life evolved after the tragedy, changes made even more difficult by the loss of the family home, a controlling uncle—“suspicion and loathing for him clung to me like moss to tree bark”—and a remote, anguished mother. As a child, Collins obviously wasn’t able to approach her mother’s condition from a clinical perspective; she merely saw a woman with whom she’d desperately like to connect but, in another of the book’s many compelling metaphors, who “resisted speaking of things that bothered her like a clam resisted being opened by a starfish.” In only the first year after her father’s death, she writes, “there had been so many changes….Things I couldn’t foresee; things I couldn’t control.” Finally, one “dark night of winter,” she found her mother sitting silent and alone in their modest apartment, her “crystal blue eyes” having turned “strangely dark—like two black disks void of focus or feeling.” Her mother had packed a suitcase to go to California. “Terror mainlined in my veins,” Collins remembers. Her mother had electroshock treatments in a psychiatric ward, where a nurse unraveled the mystery, telling Collins that she was in a deep depression. The later part of the book, in which Collins describes her college years and a relationship with a student who became her first husband, is less gripping. But as a whole, the memoir is an effective exploration of change and how to come to terms with it. Through all the losses, Collins says, she was “beginning to begin a long process of discernment about how I wanted to handle my life, wherever the river of time would carry me.”
The heart-rending effects of change laid bare.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1452556390
Page Count: 280
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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