edited by Elizabeth Benedict ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 2, 2013
A winning collection—think of it as an extra slice of pie set aside for mom.
Thirty-one essays by mothers and daughters, refracting the light of motherhood in unusual and beautiful directions.
“Every day should be Mother’s Day.” That’s what many mothers say every year, and correctly. Mothers, mamas, moms—they give more of themselves than is reasonable. “A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie,” said Tenneva Jordan, a woman famous primarily for that statement. There are entire libraries’ worth of books about mothers, which include quotations, aphorisms, devotionals and essays. This collection, edited by novelist Benedict (Almost, 2001, etc.), would likely be shelved with those many others, but it deserves a place front and center. Contributors include a mix of well-known writers (Ann Hood, Mary Gordon, Elinor Lipman, Joyce Carol Oates, Roxana Robinson, etc.) with others still on the rise. Oates writes about a quilt passed down through the years. Emma Straub chronicles a cruise gifted to her by her mother; she describes it as “the maritime version of No Exit.” Maud Newton writes about how she and her mother circle each other warily, their orbits held by a love of literature. Other contributors include Elissa Schappell, Marge Piercy, Luanne Rice, Eleanor Clift, Lisa See and Margo Jefferson, and all contribute thoughtful, unexpected and fresh takes on their mothers and daughters. “Each of the contributors,” writes Benedict in the introduction, “describes a gift from her mother—three-dimensional, experiential, a work habit, a habit of being, a way of seeing the world—that magically, movingly reveals the story of her mother and of their relationship.”
A winning collection—think of it as an extra slice of pie set aside for mom.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61620-135-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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