by Douglas Keil ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 14, 2016
A heartwarming fictional tribute to a son’s cancer-free life by a grateful parent.
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Keil’s (The Girl in the Freezer, 2016, etc.) novel, inspired by true events, tells the story of a teenager’s battle with cancer, as told through impassioned letters to his father.
The author offers a moving, inspired fictionalized re-creation of his 14-year-old son Dustin’s treatment for leukemia more than three decades ago. (The book was written shortly after Dustin was discharged from the hospital, and he’s now in remission.) As an “absent father living in another part of the country” when his son received the diagnosis, Keil says that he found the imaginative writing process to be a powerful kind of therapy. The book begins with Dustin writing a letter to his father, shortly after he’s admitted to the hospital. The missives become more engaged, impassioned, and searingly poignant as the story progresses and the direness of Dustin’s situation begins to sink in. The author consistently demonstrates a talent for portraying the voice and wide-eyed perspective of a teen facing the most trying time of his young life. Dustin’s mother, who initially finds it difficult to even face her son in his hospital bed, is portrayed with grace and striking compassion. Overall, Keil’s imagined depiction of his son’s ordeal comes across as profoundly genuine, and it will be eye-opening for readers who are unfamiliar with grueling chemotherapy treatments; it portrays Dustin’s aversion to needle sticks, his blunt confusion and mounting, displaced anger at his diagnosis, and his blind fear of a hospital stay. Some of the descriptions of medical procedures, even from Dustin’s uninitiated vantage point, will be challenging reading for the faint of heart. The epistolary quality of the narrative impressively and vibrantly encapsulates its protagonist’s emotions and trepidations as he is surrounded by doctors and nurses, deals with cold rooms and intimidating, mysterious smells and sounds, and grapples with an illness that, for a teen, is nearly impossible to comprehend. The story is suitable for both adult and YA readers, and it will be particularly instructive for newly diagnosed leukemia patients.
A heartwarming fictional tribute to a son’s cancer-free life by a grateful parent.Pub Date: March 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5229-7676-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Douglas Keil
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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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