A painful but deeply moving account about enduring the worst of times.
A debut author recounts her harrowing journey through addiction, poverty, and depression.
As a little girl, Fantroy-Johnson would daydream about growing up to be a teacher, living in a modest house, and having two kids—worthy goals inspired by her hardworking mother. Unfortunately, after her mother died when she was just 12 years old, the author was set on a path that would lead her to the dramatic moment she chooses for her memoir’s opening: the day she decided to wash down 30 muscle relaxers with rosé. She woke from a coma two weeks later, bitter that she was still alive. After explaining this lowest point, Fantroy-Johnson goes back to her childhood as an African-American girl in Detroit, remembering John F. Kennedy’s assassination and its aftermath. “My eyes got a bit clearer about our situation and position in life. I saw my neighborhood in a different way,” she writes about the tensions that eventually led to riots. In her personal life, turmoil reigned as well. After passing from one neglectful caretaker to the next, Fantroy-Johnson ended up with her own daughter, Tamiko, and an abusive, drug-dealing boyfriend named Thomas; this situation would eventually drive her to attempt suicide. It wasn’t until Tamiko was diagnosed with sickle cell anemia that Fantroy-Johnson would start to piece her life together, attending school, seeking better employment, and starting the process of recovery from her continued dependence on alcohol and drugs. The author’s constant, devastating honesty in describing this process keeps her memoir engrossing. “Each time that I set out to quit, I ended up drunk,” she writes of one of the many relapses that make her ordeal feel genuine and urgent. With simple, brutal sentences, Fantroy-Johnson concisely relays her feelings about each tragic event. Concerning her rape as a teenager, she writes: “I can still remember like it was yesterday the rape and losing my virginity, and I have been deeply scarred.” Her eventual triumphs, including climbing Mount Everest, receive much less attention, which makes for a heavy read. But her focus on her struggles remains highly compelling nonetheless.
A painful but deeply moving account about enduring the worst of times.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4897-1202-8
Page Count: 190
Publisher: LifeRichPublishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2017
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
