A captivating memoir about a daughter’s reunion with her birth mother and the intricate consequences it had on both their...
Journalist Clarke’s story of her discovery that her biological mother was Carol “Cookie” Cole, the daughter of Nat King Cole, a revelation that caused her to build a life-altering relationship with her through the exchange of letters, phone calls and postcards.
The author is an award-winning journalist and the happy mother of two. She is also the adopted daughter of two parents who gave her a wonderful life. When she visited the agency that handled her adoption, she only sought information on her genetic heritage, which she required for medical reasons. The details she received from the agency, however, as well as a series of remarkable coincidences, helped her realize that her birth mother was Cookie Cole, the daughter of the legendary musician. The author’s discovery forced her to acknowledge a deep-rooted curiosity she had about her birth mother since childhood. “All adoptees are curious about their beginnings,” she writes. “Anyone who claims otherwise (as I have many times) is lying.” So she reached out to Cookie in search of answers to the questions she had convinced herself, up until that point, that she could ignore. Clarke’s prose is elegant, crisp and deeply personal, and her narration is gripping, even after she reconnects with her biological mother and uncovers the truth about her own origins. Happy endings in life are seldom conclusions, and that Clarke gets one only complicated her story more. “Whose life is this anyway?” writes Cookie in one of her letters to her daughter, a fraught question coming from a woman who created life, only to have life force her to give her child away. Clarke effectively explores her crisis of identity by peeling back layer after layer of a complex, riveting personal history.
A captivating memoir about a daughter’s reunion with her birth mother and the intricate consequences it had on both their lives.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-210317-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 25, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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