Sincere and uplifting stories of being a mother, a wife, and a career woman while juggling the responsibilities of being the...
A former second lady talks about her family, relationships, and career as an educator.
In this often poignant retelling, Biden shares some of the more meaningful moments of her life. She tells how she married when she was 18 and then divorced, an act that made her hesitant to enter into marriage again. But she was wooed by then Sen. Joe Biden and fell in love despite her previous failed marriage and fears of being a mother to two young boys. Throughout, the author discusses the importance of family and traditions, such as lighting candles for an evening meal or traveling to Nantucket for Thanksgiving, and of her prankster nature as a child and adult. She shares how the Bidens stand together as a united front in the face of adversity, something that has helped them through extremely difficult times, most significantly the death of Beau Biden from brain cancer in 2015. She explores her insecurities and introverted nature, two issues that made it difficult to be in the spotlight as the wife of a public figure. However, she was able to overcome these concerns in order to present speeches and provide support for her husband during his run for president and later when he became vice president during the Obama administration. The author also shows us her deep involvement with her students and the importance of having her own career and rewarding work with military families and the education of girls and women. Biden’s tone is conversational and partially confessional, an endearing quality. Through this personal disclosure, readers gain insight into the fortitude and courage it takes to be a woman with a career and a close-knit family, with the obligations that come with a life as the second lady.
Sincere and uplifting stories of being a mother, a wife, and a career woman while juggling the responsibilities of being the vice president’s wife.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-18232-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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