Tidd combines indignation and sarcasm with humility, and the result is a moving, helpful look at how to navigate the...
“I spent my eleventh wedding anniversary planning my husband’s funeral.” So begins Tidd’s emotional memoir of coping with life after becoming a single mother with three children at the age of 31.
One of the greatest innovations of the Internet age is how it has facilitated people connecting with other people who have similar interests. One example is the online support group; no matter the nature of support required, there’s likely an online group focused on that need. The author discovered this when, one summer morning in 2007, her husband was injured in a traffic accident; as his condition went from bad to worse, she had to make the decision to let him die. Heartbroken and in uncharted waters, Tidd turned to the Internet and began sharing her story with others. The “Widdahood” website was born, and she became a national speaker on grief, coping strategies and the benefits of organ donation. This book is an extension of these efforts, but the author goes farther and creates a narrative out of her struggles with coping, managing the affairs following her husband’s death, and finding new ways to look at old beliefs. Few stones are left unturned: Tidd found herself the target of judgments about the grieving process, and despite multiple resources designed to support her, she was often confused and lost. At the end of the book, the author also provides tips for supporters of widows and widowers on such topics as memorializing, coping, setting milestones, dating, moving forward and “What to Say (and What Not to Say) After Loss” (don’t say: “This was part of God’s plan” or “I know how you feel”).
Tidd combines indignation and sarcasm with humility, and the result is a moving, helpful look at how to navigate the difficult times that come with tremendous loss.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8522-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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