An honest, heart-rending account of yet another aspect of human trafficking.
The author recounts navigating corruption in Uganda, where she attempted to adopt children.
In the early pages of Bonneur’s debut memoir, a heartbreaking statement is made by the author: “I lost six kids in the span of eighteen months. And they were never really mine.” By her own admission, Bonneur, a devout Christian married to a Marine veteran, was drawn to the idea of the adventure of an international adoption, and she gave little thought to the possibility of exploitation within the industry. She was introduced to James and Kira, supposedly put up for adoption because of a “tribal taboo.” It quickly became clear James didn’t understand what was happening, and his mother didn’t wish to part with her children, despite the work of the overzealous ministry. The second introduction was to Benjamin and Anna, two children who bullied each other constantly and regularly attempted to escape. They had been stolen by a pastor looking to sell children to support his church. She met Paul and Sasha, the latter prone to constant tantrums. She discovered much of Sasha’s distress was egged on by Paul, who, it turned out, was a young con coached by his mother. Crestfallen, the author returned home in 2015, eyes wide open about the system and with a deep desire to share her adventure-turned–cautionary tale with others hoping to adopt abroad. Bonneur gives a warts-and-all view, from detailing the extensive bureaucracy and money involved to her attempts to reunite the exploited children with their families to her profound personal challenges. Her memoir includes shared correspondence, personal journal entries, Scripture, and black-and-white photos. Crushing as all this is, the book also celebrates Uganda’s people, wildlife, and culture.
An honest, heart-rending account of yet another aspect of human trafficking.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5320-1451-2
Page Count: 214
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
