A remembrance that effectively captures the author’s emotional pain and her attempts to come to terms with it.
The daughter of legendary sportscaster George Michael recalls their fractious relationship.
On author Cindi Michael’s 16th birthday, her father, then the host of the popular sports highlights TV show The George Michael Sports Machine, wrote her: “No father in this world has ever had a better daughter bring him more pride than you bring me.” Yet by her first year in college, she says, he’d effectively disowned her, and, a few years before his death in 2009, he told her not to contact him “EVER,” accusing her of causing “more pain and heartache than I could tolerate.” As one of three children, she basked in her father’s love as a young girl, but that love, she writes, “had to be earned” due to her father’s perfectionist expectations. The difficulties accelerated, she says, after her parents separated in 1973, when she was 8; she recalls lamenting that she “hadn’t said enough bad things about my mother” during a custody hearing. When she later suggested family therapy, she says that her father responded, “Ain’t no way in hell I’m doing that.” The disowning appears to have been triggered, in part, by the author’s affair at 18 with the vice principal of her high school, an experience she says she might have avoided “If only I hadn’t been so starved for love.” In this memoir, Michael meticulously traces the agonizing course of a fractious relationship that still haunts her. There is, of course, no shortage of memoirs about benighted families, but the author, who says that she’s also estranged from her sister, is unflinching in her self-analysis in this remembrance: “Twenty years later, I am still trying to figure out if the strength of my love for them is a blessing or a curse,” she writes. Now a mother of two herself, she provides the insight that “the past—a difficult one anyway—can only be laid to rest when we have examined and understood it.” Burying the past, she says, “was my father’s greatest downfall.”
A remembrance that effectively captures the author’s emotional pain and her attempts to come to terms with it.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-107-2
Page Count: 312
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 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
