An enjoyable, moving read about the pleasure of being just a little bit different.
A memoir about a free-spirited young woman who, together with her quirky family, prepares for her grandmother’s death.
Debut author Neal tells the story of her large, unique and oft-reconstituted family that suffered through “three generations of failed marriages.” Shortly after the book begins, Buffi is called to the bedside of her grandmother Mopsie, a woman considered by her offspring to be both an uber-matriarch and dark mystery. Buffi’s unnamed mother assures her that unlike the many other near-death moments Mopsie has endured during her time in hospice, this time, Mopsie is really dying. But she’s not: After an overnight scare, Mopsie miraculously recovers yet again. The closer-than-usual brush with death reminds all of Mopsie’s grandchildren that they ought to be visiting her in hospice more frequently. As a result, readers see Buffi spending time with her siblings, especially her excommunicated brother, David, and even her persistently antagonizing mother. Buffi and her family pass many hours reminiscing and sorting through Mopsie’s belongings, and Neal’s straightforward, richly detailed prose offers a cornucopia of family memories painting a vibrant picture of Buffi’s childhood. With both insight and humor, Neal describes many of her family’s offbeat experiences, such as living with their Christian mother on an Israeli kibbutz, her mother’s affair with a married man and her sister’s kidnapping by Mopsie. Buffi concludes that Mopsie’s stubborn refusal to die must be a sign of unfinished business on this Earth. Although at moments the book reads more like a personal tribute to her family and less like a factual work meant for the public, Neal’s affection for her family is so palpable it nearly jumps off the page. Readers will find themselves hoping Buffi will finally discover her distinctive place in this family she so clearly adores.
An enjoyable, moving read about the pleasure of being just a little bit different.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-1451591019
Page Count: 198
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2013
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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