At its best moments, good bubble-bath reading. But the best moments are rare.
A rambling, energetic memoir about identity and familial culture.
First-time author Anders, a special correspondent for the Washington Post, was born to Jewish parents in Cuba. In 1960, when she was three, her family fled to the U.S. Here, she describes the life of a “Jubana,” a Jewish-Cuban woman. Anders has a distinctive voice, and she’ll score with some readers because she explores an interesting and little-known subculture. The chapter devoted to her friendship with “her first WASP” will strike chords with Jewish readers everywhere. Unfortunately, though, she trades in stereotypes: Jubanas pop out of the womb trying to look pretty; they are sent to bed every night in panties, sometimes even a bra, and therefore have “no clue about [their] own sexual potential”; mothers of Jubanas spend their whole lives planning their daughters’ weddings, etc. Many of these ostensibly humorous forays into typecasting simply aren’t that funny. The strongest sections detail Anders’s relationship with her fiancé, including their argument about Elián González and their premarital visit with a Reform rabbi. Too often, though, her tic-ridden prose gets in the way of her stories. Her mother, for example, is quite a stitch, but the author’s attempts to capture Mami’s accent are hard to follow and annoying. (“Johs beeleeohns and zeeleeohns of eh-sperms and eggs just goheengh krehsee!”) Sometimes Anders’s idioms are quirky to the point of distraction, to wit her description of birth: “Okay. I’m out of Mami and home in my beautiful new hand-painted, imported crib.” And her handling of Spanish is irksome; she follows every foreign word with a translation set off by commas, as in “I’ve got a táta, a nanny . . . a cocinera, a cook . . . and a criada, a housekeeper.” Sales may benefit from the popularity of Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana (2003), but this memoir is not nearly as good.
At its best moments, good bubble-bath reading. But the best moments are rare.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-056369-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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