An intimately revealing and moving memoir.
A successful marketing executive’s account of how her estranged husband’s terminal cancer diagnosis brought them together again and taught her to “live every day of my life with urgency.”
As Saint John shows, she and her husband, Peter, were very different people. She was the American daughter of middle-class Ghanaian immigrants who had settled in Colorado; he was the son of working-class Italian Americans from Massachusetts. Even though she longed for a “Black Prince Charming,” she fell head over heels in love with Peter, who had no Black friends but had “a profound interest in the African American experience.” Together, they faced considerable opposition from Saint John’s father and from Peter’s family, who treated her like she was a mere “passing fancy.” Even cosmopolitan New York City, the place they called home, failed to provide a safe haven. Rather than be “swept up in that diverse city’s embrace,” they found themselves subjected to hostility from both Black and White strangers. Nonetheless, they overcame the challenges within their families and got married only to come face to face with their own interpersonal differences. As Saint John’s career brought new opportunities, her husband suffocated her and “advised me against following my gut.” After losing their first child during the birthing process, they had a second, seeking to fix a “broken” relationship. They separated and had other relationships until Peter was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given a short time to live. Faced with an urgency to “stuff years’ worth of memories” into Peter’s last days, the author came to the realization that his illness and death could serve as lessons in gratitude for the things and people in her life that she had not taken the time to appreciate. Tender and fierce, this book explores loss, interracial love, and the complexity of human emotion with humility, candor, and grace.
An intimately revealing and moving memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2023
ISBN: 9780593300176
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
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
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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