An achingly beautiful chronicle of unfathomable sorrow, flickering hope and quiet redemption.
Profoundly moving memoir of the author’s agony and perseverance as she lost her two teenage daughters to the streets, and of the slow, painful reconciliation they eventually found.
After divorcing her husband, Gwartney (Writing/Portland State Univ. and Univ. of Oregon) moved with her four girls from Arizona to Oregon. The divorce brought desperate sadness to the two oldest daughters, Stephanie and Amanda, who became pawns in the endless battles between their parents. Gwartney did not see at first that the girls were becoming two halves of a single alienated self. She didn’t understand their angry sorrow and was bewildered that she could not find a way to fix their injuries. Both eventually succumbed to the lure of the streets, to drugs and booze, panhandling, sleeping in abandoned buildings and stumbling home when they wished, reeking of urine, filth, cigarettes and fury. When Amanda was 16 and Stephanie 14, they left for good. In the sparsest of elegant prose, Gwartney tries to make sense of it all: why this happened to her and her daughters, who is to blame, why nothing—not counseling, rehab, wilderness therapy, nor dozens of other programs—did any good. Time shifts as she writes; past episodes, remembrances and snippets of conversation intersect seamlessly with her internal dialogues of guilt and resentment. The girls did at last come home, and slowly began to save themselves. Amanda went to college, and Stephanie discovered herself at Colorado’s Eagle Rock School. Yet Gwartney’s relief was tempered by the thought that they had been redeemed not because of her but despite her. In 2003, Amanda gave birth to a son. As mother and daughters lay together in bed comforting the newborn, a love that was always there but lost amidst rage and recriminations was rediscovered.
An achingly beautiful chronicle of unfathomable sorrow, flickering hope and quiet redemption.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-547-05447-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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
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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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