Several exquisitely told tales that will touch even the most hard-nosed readers.
A debut memoir by a former professor that doesn’t gloss over painful moments in her life.
Roberts begins by recounting the challenges she faced when she lost and regained her vision—not once, but twice, due to corneal edema and transplants. But as remarkable as those struggles are, they’re not the book’s focus; instead, as suggested by the title, they’re merely the source of a metaphor that ties her story together. There’s so much more about her life to be found in this volume, which mostly consists of prose, alongside a few poems, as well as a one-act play. Italicized text before each section provides helpful background information and effectively communicates its themes. After the introduction, the author turns back the clock to reveal what she sees as the miraculous circumstances surrounding her own adoption at the age of 6 months. She writes wistfully of a childhood marked by the death of her mother, a problematic relationship with her stepmother, and her own serious health issues. She connects these darker themes to her continual self-questioning even in the face of later success as a communications professor at Ohio Northern University. Regarding her anxiety over a play she produced, for example, she writes: “The doubt was, and still is, there like an anvil I think I will drag forever.” Over the course of her career, which she calculates involved “listening to 63,820 presentations over thirty-six years,” she recalls notable achievements with competitive speech teams as well as “Readers Theater” productions. She also includes absolutely lovely moments with her paternal grandparents, her dissertation adviser, and a lifelong friend from her days in a Catholic boarding school, in a chapter titled “The Book of Cecilia.” There are also moving tributes to a lamb named Soda Pop, a donkey named Skeeter, and a cat named Pipkin. Her “Letters to Pipkin,” written after the death of her companion of 19 years, are sure to affect anyone who has ever lost a pet.
Several exquisitely told tales that will touch even the most hard-nosed readers.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4582-1896-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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