Sex, drugs, and an obsession with ``my writing'' dominate this self-absorbed journal of a nonetheless remarkable teenager. Runaway was a bestseller in Canada, although it's not clear why. While this 14-year-old's diary is steamy in its descriptions of front-seat sex, it's also raw and unfinished in its conventional and self-conscious prose. Now 23, Lau (Fresh Girls and Other Stories, 1995), a Chinese-Canadian, ran away from her Vancouver home when she was only 14 to escape overprotective parents with impossibly high standards. Although she was already a published poet, she was also bulimic and thinking of suicide. Sheltered after her escape from home by a network of young activists, she was retrieved quickly by Canada's social service network. But Lau never returned to live with her parents. Instead, she slipped in and out of the interstices of the safety net, at one point fleeing to Boston. Too far from home, she turned herself in to be brought back to Vancouver by her social workers, who complainedwith justiceabout the money and effort being expended to lasso her. Placed in a series of group and foster homes when she wasn't on the street or on the run, Lau was eventually allowed her own apartment. From there, she dipped even more deeply into prostitution (in cars and vans, no penetration), drugs (Valium, LSD, methadone, and more), and suicide (three attempts), telling all to two psychiatrists and what seems to be a rasher of frustrated but endlessly patient social workers. But she also went back to school and never stopped writingeither her journal or poems submitted to various magazines, some of which were accepted and published, as was this diary. Outspoken but without insight, naive but capable of inflicting great pain: Lau's adolescent reflections aredespite their shock valueno more than that.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-88910-491-3
Page Count: 276
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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