Readers who fell in love with Rodriguez’s chronicle of life in Afghanistan will surely revel in this candid, intimate tale...
After being forced to flee Afghanistan, Rodriguez (co-author: Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil, 2007) initially settled on an isolated mountaintop in Northern California. Here, she recounts her rocky readjustment to American life and eventual relocation to Mexico.
Back in the States, the once-confident, outgoing businesswoman found life in California unsettling, and she could not find suitable work or make friends. Eventually diagnosed with PTSD, the author received little substantive help for her problem. “I felt everything, all right,” she writes, “but wallowing in all that loss, grief, and loneliness left me exhausted, and even more depressed.” Always an adventure seeker and traveler, Rodriguez opted for a cruise to Mazatlan, Mexico, with a male friend. Beguiled by the sun, sand and ocean, she returned to the resort community and purchased a tiny bungalow. “So finally, I did what I should have done much, much earlier,” she writes. “I gave myself permission to leave.” The author packed her cat and her belongings into her car and headed south to her new home, where she slowly began rebuilding her life. She found a counselor who understood PTSD, and she surrounded herself with a vibrant group of new friends. Eventually, Rodriguez’s son relocated from the States and quickly married a local woman. Soon enough, the author became a grandmother. “And as horrified as some people my age might have been hearing news like that, I, on the other hand, was struck with wonder,” she writes. Business blossomed when Rodriguez opened a salon featuring pedicures and manicures. Realizing local girls needed help securing their futures, the author established Project Mariposa, which provides funds for girls to attend beauty school.
Readers who fell in love with Rodriguez’s chronicle of life in Afghanistan will surely revel in this candid, intimate tale of starting over in middle age in a new country.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-1066-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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