Awkwardly told tale of how one family raised a Down's syndrome child to achieve far beyond expectations. Despite Burke's name as primary author and the implication of the subtitle, this story is not told in his own words (with the exception of three very brief sections), nor is it an ``as told to''; this is journalist McDaniel's overwritten account of how the Burkes raised their handicapped son and how he realized his childhood ambition to become an actor. Against all odds, Burke has become a star of the TV series Life Goes On—in which he portrays a high-school student with Down's syndrome—a role model for others, and a spokesperson for various organizations promoting the rights of the handicapped. Unfortunately, although McDaniel, a former Life correspondent, exhibits considerable zeal in researching Burke's life story, she shows limited ability to select the significant detail. She seems to have spoken to—and quoted—nearly everyone who has ever known him, even when their observations and insights were obviously limited: e.g., teachers' aides, former classmates, co-workers at the public school where he once ran an elevator, even a guest star on Life Goes On. From them come such comments as: ``He was quite a kid''; ``He was a good kid: he didn't bother anyone''; ``He knew how to get his words across and everything.'' It is difficult to believe that even readers with Down's syndrome family members will not tire of the Burke minutiae (Chris's words on first meeting Dan Ackroyd: ``Hi, Dan!''). On the plus side, the final chapter contains useful information on the syndrome and puts Burke's life into perspective. The story of how ordinary people met extraordinary demands and how a special child became an unexpected success, marred in the telling by repetition and overattention to trivia. (Twenty- five b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-385-41645-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
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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