by Jeanine Cornillot ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2009
A charming, often sorrowful study of learning to let go of a myth and love a person.
What it’s like when the dad you dream of is not the dad you have.
Cornillot, now an Emmy-winning TV producer, shared a bedroom with her mother—who worked two jobs to support her four children—until she was a teenager. She didn’t meet her father, Hector—a Cuban revolutionary later turned against Castro who had been sentenced to 30 years in a Miami prison for a series of political bombings when the author was two years old—until she was six, when she was sent from the Irish-American enclave of her mother’s Philadelphia family to pass the summer in Miami with her Spanish-speaking Cuban relatives. En route to the prison to visit him for the first time, Cornillot’s cousin Lola—whose father had also spent some time in prison—instructed her on the etiquette of the yard, “like a miniature guard.” The moat is filled with hungry alligators, she told young Jeanine, and they will eat you. The fence surrounding the prison is electrified and can kill you. Finally, do not tell the guards about any secret notes you plan to sneak in. The first meeting—and most subsequent meetings—with Hector turned out to be grave disappointments, and the story is ostensibly structured around Cornillot’s attempts to understand and engage with a complicated, sometimes selfish, often self-righteous man who confessed at one point that he’d asked her mother to abort each of their children. But the most engaging sections focus on the author’s droll, self-possessed mother and her world-weary young bilingual cousins in Miami. Cornillot’s obvious delight with the family she came to know compensates for the frustrated narrative surrounding her father.
A charming, often sorrowful study of learning to let go of a myth and love a person.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0038-0
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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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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