A straightforward, full documentation of the challenges encountered in providing care to society’s most neglected children.
Diaristic account of providing foster care to a woefully abused child.
Glass, a prolific author of books on her experiences as a foster parent (A Baby’s Cry, 2012, etc.), was initially reluctant to provide a foster home for a girl as severely abused as Aimee, who was “on the child protection register at birth.” Although the author had experience with traumatized children who acted out toward the social workers and foster parents who stepped in, even she was shocked by Aimee’s physical condition and behavior: ill-clothed, lice-ridden, addicted to sweets, rude and possessed of a sexual knowledge indicative of abuse. As Aimee began to adjust to the foster-care experience, Glass found the process more difficult due to the disturbances caused by Aimee’s mother, Susan, a wretched drug addict who had clearly left Aimee vulnerable to unsavory men. Susan threatened Aimee and made up dramatic stories for the various social workers attempting to manage the case, though she also eventually gave a partial admission of her faults: “You know how to look after kids. I never did. I’m not a bad person, I just can’t look after kids properly.” Although Aimee’s story has a happy ending, Glass ends with a reminder that Aimee is “one of millions of children worldwide who are not rescued when their parents fail.” The author writes in a straightforward and journalistic rather than melodramatic fashion, which makes the grisly back story of the misdeeds committed against Aimee easier to bear. However, she chooses not to employ editorial compression, so readers witness what seems to be the complete daily progress of Glass’ relationship with Aimee and her many drama-filled encounters with Susan. It is a monotonous approach to disturbing material.
A straightforward, full documentation of the challenges encountered in providing care to society’s most neglected children.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-00-748677-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harper Element
Review Posted Online: Nov. 5, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2012
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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