An intimate, somewhat gloomy, account of resilience.
A detailed memoir blends prose and poetry to tell the story of a woman’s struggle to overcome the pain of loss and abuse.
Born in New York in 1942, Rapp describes herself as “the daughter of a strong mother / And a weak father.” She recounts a painful childhood, an insecure adolescence, and an uncomfortable adulthood all characterized by repeated incidents of rejection and cruelty at the hands of her parents and boyfriends, some casually dismissive, some outright abusive. Rebellious and passive by turns, Rapp was a dogged survivor, using her skills to forge a stable career as a rehabilitation counselor to help disabled people access their rights and benefits. Her search for love was less successful; she seemed to drift from one unsuccessful relationship to another against the backdrop of the societal changes of the 1960s and ’70s. Occasional poems accent the text with an emotional perspective on events, and the last section of the book is a collection of 24 poems titled “The End of Innocence.” Some, like “Central Park Summer,” employ almost the exact wording of the prose section; others offer personal comments on events such as the 9/11 attacks and the Sandy Hook school shooting. While Rapp’s frankness adds interest, her storytelling is frequently flat. For example, about her boyfriend Larry’s struggle with impotence, she writes: “He went to a doctor, who gave him a shot and his problem was cured.” The overall bleak tone might benefit from more flashes of humor, such as the sly paragraph that introduces the book: “I must have been a miracle baby because my parents slept in separate beds in my room and did not talk to each other except to argue, yet they made me.”
An intimate, somewhat gloomy, account of resilience.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5150-8104-3
Page Count: 182
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2017
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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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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