An uninspiring collection of recollections, but one that avid fans of Christian memoirs may enjoy.
A devout Catholic grandmother offers a memoir in which she shares her glimpses of God’s everyday miracles.
When most women are looking forward to retirement, Panaggio’s new life was about to begin. She’d just divorced her husband of 29 years, and had stopped the heavy drinking and partying that had been so much a part of her life. She also found a renewed devotion to God. In this brief, 100-page memoir, Panaggio shares a journal she kept for 28 years, beginning from her 1981 divorce. Her life is full of inspiring achievements: She spent her golden years acting in plays, commercials and even the occasional movie, running a modeling school, working as a talent scout, and in her spare time, writing poems and short stories. (The book cover mentions her 1998 chapbook Into the Spirit, A Poetic Witness and a few anthologies that included her works.) Those promising trappings, though, fall somewhat flat on the page. Instead, the book reads like an assortment of notes, jumping from one person, place or thing to the next, like a stone skimming across a lake. Readers learn that John, Panaggio’s co-star in a production of Fiddler on the Roof, died of AIDS, that her Aunt Angie gave her $600 to publish her poetry collection, and that her friend Marie accompanied her on a trip to Arizona. But readers receive little insight into who all these people really are; even the author’s children and grandchildren remain virtual strangers in these seemingly random entries. One consistent thread runs through these entries: the author’s belief in God’s power. To every friend, she offers a blessing, a prayer, or at the very least, a promise of salvation. However, grammatical and spelling errors crop up as often as Bible quotes; for example, the book describes an emotionless actor as too “blaze,” and reports that Panaggio went on an “Elder Hostile.”
An uninspiring collection of recollections, but one that avid fans of Christian memoirs may enjoy.Pub Date: April 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450062657
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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BOOK REVIEW
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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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