A welcome addition to the expanding literature about coming-of-age in Appalachia.
A family memoir that celebrates the inspiration of strong women within a rural culture most often characterized as patriarchal.
Chambers, a member of the Democratic National Committee, knows how fortunate she was to experience the world beyond her Appalachian home in Kentucky and, especially, to graduate from Yale and Harvard Law. Yet she could not have done so without the examples of her mother, the first in her family to graduate from high school as well as college, and her grandmother. “I don’t have enough ways to honor them, these women of the Appalachian hills,” she writes. “Women who built a support system for me and the others. The best way I know is to tell their stories.” Chambers provides information about Appalachia in general, including the poverty and lack of resources, the collapse of the coal and tobacco industries, and the drug epidemics that have decimated the region. There are also stories that illuminate the hardworking spirit and flashes of hope among the populace, the women in particular. People in these communities supported each other because they knew that no one else would; “generosity was both an insurance policy and a deeply held value.” But the primary story is personal, as the author chronicles how she left home to discover a world of privilege amid the privileged. After graduating from Yale, she had “figured out the system, the code, the secret password into this world that had seemed so mysterious for so long….But…as I fit in more at Yale, I fit in less in the mountains. I didn’t know how to be both of these people at the same time.” The various narrative strands come together as Chambers returns home to provide legal aid to those who can’t afford it. She relates the stories of women battling poverty, domestic violence, drug habits, and other ills that run rampant throughout the region. Ultimately, it was home in Kentucky that she found her purpose, identity, and voice.
A welcome addition to the expanding literature about coming-of-age in Appalachia.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984818-91-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
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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