An autobiographical saga by a pseudonymous woman who kidnaps her children from their father and escapes with them into hiding. Reeling and Writhing (not reviewed) chronicled Lawrence's marriage and subsequent effort to get her children away from her husband, who she claimed played sexual games with them. This sequel picks up in 1965: Lawrence has fled with the children, seven-year-old Olivia (who soon becomes Linda) and four-year-old Tony (who stubbornly retains his name), to California via Arizona. But so riddled is this book with false trails that California may actually be Maine and Arizona an alias for Michigan, Olivia/Linda may be a boy and Tony a girl. Whoever and wherever they really are, they find a house, the children enroll in school, and the author begins a series of jobs as a teacher, her real-life calling—or is it? Her job requires fingerprints, school transcripts, and unassailable references, all of which she gets with the help of friends and the underground network that flourished in the '60s. Although she lives in fear that Tony, who was not so sure about leaving his father, will blurt out the truth, her husband does not find them. Fear must have imprinted these difficult years in Lawrence's memory like circuits on a microchip: She describes them in such evocative detail (rooms, furniture, the death of Henrietta the Thanksgiving turkey) that the book could be fiction—or is it? Interspersed are entries from her journals, which seem mostly to deal with the question ``Are the children happy?'' Apparently they are: Both go on to college, and a letter from her daughter in the epilogue states, ``I can only be grateful that I had such a strong mother.'' Even after three decades, Lawrence chooses anonymity because ``I am still a felon.'' These revelations challenge credulity, but they remain relevant due to the persistent newspaper headlines over vicious custody battles.
Pub Date: May 31, 1995
ISBN: 1-878448-63-3
Page Count: 222
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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
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