by Jessica Teich ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 17, 2016
An honest, compassionate memoir about shaking off personal demons and finding “solace…liberation [and] joy.”
An account of the author’s obsession with a female Rhodes scholar who killed herself at 27.
In 1981, Teich (co-author: Trees Make the Best Mobiles: Simple Ways to Raise Your Child in a Complex World, 2001) was a senior at Yale. She was also among a tiny minority of women vying for a Rhodes scholarship, which had only just begun to be open to female applicants. Uncertain as she felt about herself as “a writer, a loner, a dancer, a Jew,” the author was nevertheless among those selected to attend Oxford for two years of postgraduate work. The scholarship afforded her many elite academic—and later, career—opportunities. Yet Teich never felt entirely comfortable with the idea that she would forever be identified with a born-for-success group of individuals educated to “fight the world’s fight.” Privately, she saw herself as a “toxic” woman with a perverse need for mistreatment from men and a tainted past that included a sexually abusive relationship with a dance teacher. Now a happily married woman with two children, Teich suddenly developed a morbid fixation with her daughter's personal safety. She also came across an obituary for another former Rhodes scholar who had died under tragic circumstances. Lacey Cooper-Reynolds was a golden girl hailed as “brilliant…radiant [and] beguiling,” but she committed suicide just as her life and career had begun to bloom. Fascinated by the young woman's story, Teich researched her background and history relentlessly. Like the author, Cooper-Reynolds was also an outsider, but one whose difference came of a modest background worlds apart from the high-society glamour of Oxford. As Teich pondered the pressures her Rhodes “sister” had faced, she had to confront her own painful past as well as the fears that now threatened to destroy the family she had struggled to create. Teich’s book is not just compelling for the way it plumbs the psyche of an outwardly driven and ambitious woman; it is also provocative in its questioning of what female success really means.
An honest, compassionate memoir about shaking off personal demons and finding “solace…liberation [and] joy.”Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-58005-569-7
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Share your opinion of this book
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
Awards & Accolades
Likes
21
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
National Book Award Winner
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.