by David Collins ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 2002
Artistically rather bumpy, but Collins’s earnestness will touch most readers all the same.
Collins’s debut memoir chronicles his wife’s losing battle with breast cancer and his subsequent struggle to raise their two-year-old daughter alone.
Three months after their wedding, Louise Collins became pregnant with a much-wanted child. Seven months into the pregnancy she found a lump in her breast: a series of biopsies was performed, a malignancy confirmed. The physicians induced labor at eight months so Louise could begin six months of chemotherapy. When daughter Robin was six months old, the young couple found out that the cancer had metastasized to Louise’s lungs, necessitating a stem cell transplant. Despite these medical heroics, she died. David was thrown into a tailspin, never really getting the chance to grieve since he was instantly submerged in the grinding routine of raising a very young child alone. “I find myself managing [Robin] more than actually raising her,” he confesses at one point. “I am a man, after all.” While the story is quite moving, the writing is wildly uneven. The author’s description of slow footsteps on the stairs as his father comes to deliver the news of Louise’s death is heartfelt in its simplicity. Other scenes could have benefited from heavier editing. When he learns that the cancer has returned, Collins yells, “You motherscratchers why? Why why why why why you motherscratchers why!?” While Louise and Robin are depicted (perhaps inevitably) in a saintly fashion, Collins is less compassionate toward himself. He describes stumbling through his job, all the while relishing the peace and quiet of the office compared to the chaos of home. By the end, the author has accepted his position as a survivor with tremendous responsibilities and is ready to rejoin the living.
Artistically rather bumpy, but Collins’s earnestness will touch most readers all the same.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-86538-107-0
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Ontario Review
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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