According to the testimony in this oddly comforting volume, women never get over missing dead or absent mothers, whether they were 2 or 22 or even 52 at the time of loss. Edelman's mother died when she was 17, leaving her to cope with a grief-stricken father and younger siblings as well as her own feelings. Although she left for college the following year and later led an adventurous, independent life as a journalist, she discovered one day when she was 24 that she missed her mother so much that she was in physical pain. From that experience came a magazine article and this book. Extensive interviews and correspondence with hundreds of motherless women (self-selected through answers to ads and other outreaches) and dozens of experts taught Edelman that losing a mother through death or desertion at any age has ramifications throughout a woman's life. Even when grief is adequately expressed and the remaining family members are supportive and loving, motherless women find themselves longing for the lost parent at critical junctures in their lives: the first day of school, onset of menstruation, loss of virginity, marriage, childbirth, menopause. Daughters tend to anticipate death at the same age as their mothers' demise, in particular if it was the result of a physical or psychological disorder that might be inheritable, such as cancer or depression. Also discussed are the tricks of memory that turn the lost mother into a paragon or a wicked witch, and the difficulties experienced in adult relationships due to anger and fear of being abandoned again. As the author says, ``[My mother's] presence influenced who I was, and her absence influences who I am.'' Many women will find this book painful, but it's reassuring to have the company of others when dealing with the complex emotions and lifelong effects of a mother's loss.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-63288-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
Not an easy read but an essential one.
Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award–winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word “woke” appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi’s towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that “racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas,” the author posits a seemingly simple binary: “Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” The author, founding director of American University’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. “Internalized racism,” he writes, “is the real Black on Black Crime.” Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi’s life that exemplifies it—e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting “to be Black but…not…to look Black”—and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: “Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today.” If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he’s just as hard on himself. When he began college, “anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts.” This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and...
An enchanting plea by the award-winning Nigerian novelist to channel anger about gender inequality into positive change.
Employing personal experience in her examination of “the specific and particular problem of gender,” National Book Critics Circle winner Adichie (Americanah, 2013, etc.) gently and effectively brings the argument about whether feminism is still relevant to an accessible level for all readers. An edited version of a 2012 TEDxEuston talk she delivered, this brief essay moves from the personal to the general. The author discusses how she was treated as a second-class citizen back home in Nigeria (walking into a hotel and being taken for a sex worker; shut out of even family meetings, in which only the male members participate) and suggests new ways of socialization for both girls and boys (e.g., teaching both to cook). Adichie assumes most of her readers are like her “brilliant, progressive” friend Louis, who insists that women were discriminated against in the past but that “[e]verything is fine now for women.” Yet when actively confronted by an instance of gender bias—the parking attendant thanked Louis for the tip, although Adichie had been the one to give it—Louis had to recognize that men still don’t recognize a woman’s full equality in society. The example from her childhood at school in Nigeria is perhaps the most poignant, demonstrating how insidious and entrenched gender bias is and how damaging it is to the tender psyches of young people: The primary teacher enforced an arbitrary rule (“she assumed it was obvious”) that the class monitor had to be a boy, even though the then-9-year-old author had earned the privilege by winning the highest grade in the class. Adichie makes her arguments quietly but skillfully.
A moving essay that should find its way into the hands of all students and teachers to provoke new conversation and awareness.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-91176-1
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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