A potent memoir that rips open a most human heart.
One moment, she is on her bicycle; the next, she is on the ground, her life forever transformed by an accident that leaves her a quadriplegic.
Crosby, who still teaches part-time at Wesleyan University (English and Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) and has published scholarly works (The Ends of History: Victorians and “The Woman Question,” 1991), offers a painfully, even courageously candid memoir about her accident in 2003 and its aftermath. She says she has no memory of the moment when a branch caught in her front wheel and sent her hurtling to the ground, a collision that shattered her jaw and broke vertebrae, but she tells about her long period of rehab and the devotion of friends and, especially, of her lover, Janet. She occasionally returns to her pre-accident life to tell about her family—with special attention to her brother, Jeff, who suffered profoundly from multiple sclerosis and who died some years after her accident. The author notes the cruel unlikelihood that two siblings would become quadriplegic. Along the way, we hear about her growing awareness of her sexuality, of her great fondness for sex, her issues with alcohol, and of the active physical and intellectual life that she adored. She writes in wrenching detail about her constant pain, her bowels, her sex life, and her determination to craft a new way to live. She writes affectingly about the home-care professionals who have helped her, noting how much we all depend on them and how little we pay them. She uses poems by Emily Dickinson, William Blake, and a former student to illuminate her situation; she discusses the importance to her of George Eliot. Occasionally, she slips into academic-speak (quoting from various authorities), but it’s never for long and never enough to slow the emotional momentum she so carefully creates.
A potent memoir that rips open a most human heart.Pub Date: March 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4798-3353-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: New York Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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