by Decca Aitkenhead ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 16, 2016
An unsentimental yet affecting memoir.
An award-winning journalist’s account of how she came to terms with the accidental drowning death of her beloved companion and father of her two children.
When Aitkenhead met Tony, she was a successful writer for the Guardian who had grown up with two bohemian parents. He was a charming mixed-race crack addict who “wholesaled cocaine for a living” and smelled of “designer cologne and cannabis.” Both were married, but in time, they developed a powerful attraction to each other and left their respective spouses to become “the most implausible couple I had ever known.” Their challenging but ultimately happy union came to a tragic end 10 years later on a beach in Jamaica where Tony died trying to save their small son from drowning. Aitkenhead remembers her partner—who defied all stereotypes of a street-hustling gangster—with deep affection. “Although a criminal, he was trustworthy and surprisingly guileless,” she writes, and had a “deep hippy streak” that manifested in a love of camping, cooking, and children. A few years into their relationship, the author discovered that she was pregnant and left Tony out of fear for what his crack habit would do to their child. Unwilling to lose her, Tony immediately joined a Cocaine Anonymous group and ended all crack use. He embraced his role as father and later as a charity worker who helped “desperately dispossessed children” from dysfunctional households. With Aitkenhead’s encouragement, Tony went to college and earned a degree in psychology and criminology. That she and her partner were able to learn from each other and work through their race and class differences to form a cohesive family unit makes the book memorable. But in the end, it is the author’s resilience after her lover’s death—which she describes with poised eloquence—that renders the narrative especially satisfying.
An unsentimental yet affecting memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-54065-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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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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