An eloquently candid memoir.
A University of Chicago creative writing instructor’s account of the near-marriage–ending heartbreak he and his wife suffered as they struggled to have children.
When Raeburn first met his wife, Bekah, a potter, she immediately “felt like family.” But a shadow loomed over their relationship. Before they married, Bekah miscarried one child; later, she gave birth to a dead child they named Irene, whose cremated remains the pair kept in one of Bekah’s handmade jars. Both felt profound rage and grief, which they took out on each other and, sometimes, on themselves. To the author, Bekah’s pained pessimism seemed to hint at feelings that she was a monstrous mother “who’d rejected her child.” Haunted by their failures, they continued to try for more children. They finally succeeded when Rebekah gave birth via cesarean section to a healthy daughter. Yet even in the midst of personal happiness, Raeburn was still deeply troubled over the loss of his first child. Irene had become an absent presence that reminded them of the deaths that had not only occurred within the family, but, like the suicide of a beloved painter-friend, had also occurred outside of it. Meanwhile, Bekah became pregnant again only to miscarry. And while the family seemed to grow closer, Raeburn could begin to see the cracks emerge in the relationship with his wife. It was as though they were sacrificing “the marriage that had made [Irene]…by re-creat[ing] the [dysfunctional] ones that had made us.” At 40, Bekah finally gave birth to another daughter, which, though a joyful event, tested the bonds within the family even more. Yet in the end, the “vessel” of the Raeburns’ marriage held, “cemented” by bonds forged through blood, loss, and hope. The narrative is not only a poignant expression of how two young people matured as they created a family. It is also a celebration of the way that birth—even if that birth ends in sudden death—brings new life to parents.
An eloquently candid memoir.Pub Date: March 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-28538-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 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
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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