by Jayson Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 14, 2019
A poignantly uplifting memoir of moving forward after terrible loss.
A Brooklyn-based music journalist’s account of his 2-year-old daughter’s accidental death and his journey to acceptance of her passing.
One day, Greene and his wife, Stacy, left Greta with her grandmother. Shockingly, a brick from an eighth-story windowsill fell on Greta’s skull, causing irreversible brain damage. Overcome with grief and guilt for having “failed this little person so completely,” the couple struggled to fit the shattered pieces of their life together again. “Grief at its peak has a terrible beauty to it,” he writes, “a blinding fission of every emotion.” A bitter rage made Greene hate the “unexamined happiness” of the people—especially parents—he saw around him while Stacy was forced to confront not only her own anguish, but that of her mother. After feeling Greta’s presence in a local park, the author suddenly realized that “there will be more light upon this earth for me.” He and Stacy began attending grief workshops, one of which included a medium who encouraged them to “pay attention to signs” from their loved ones. They also decided to leave the home where Greta “padd[ed] agreeably around every corner” and start a new life—complete with what they hoped would one day be another child—elsewhere in the city. They took up yoga while Greene “became a prospector for safe screaming spaces” where he could release pent-up emotional suffering. After the couple discovered they were pregnant, they went to see a ceremonialist in New Mexico who they hoped would help them process Greta’s death along with the impending birth of the son who would never know his sister. The powerful visions of death and rebirth they experienced helped them to understand and embrace the brokenness within themselves with love, grace, and gratitude. Compassionate and sensitively told, Greene’s story accomplishes an exceptionally difficult feat: transforming tragedy into both a spiritual journey and a celebration of wonder.
A poignantly uplifting memoir of moving forward after terrible loss.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3353-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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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