by Joelle Fraser ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2013
A poignant study of gratitude for the simple life.
Fraser (The Territory of Men, 2002) soulfully evokes the year she spent in an isolated forest retreat recovering from the trauma of divorce and exploring the inner landscape of her heart.
When the author divorced her husband, the emotional fallout left her devastated. Not only was she unprepared for how joint custody would redefine her relationship to her young son Dylan, but she was also unprepared for the wave of "crippling guilt of being the one who left.” To maintain her privacy in the conservative California mountain town where they lived and ensure Dylan had access to his father, Fraser quietly moved into a tiny, one-bedroom house on the edge of a nearby forest. In this lonely but beautiful setting, Fraser began to examine her life. She thought about her Swedish great-grandmother, who was forced to leave her six children behind and follow a fugitive husband to America, where the two divorced. She eventually reunited with some of her children, but for the rest of her life, she worked "like a slave" in a land far from home. From this extraordinary woman, Fraser came to understand that survival meant "setting a course" for herself and making peace with her choices. She accepted the financial challenges of being a single parent with a low-paying job and found renewed joy in the companionship of her dog and cats. As she learned to appreciate the natural world around her, Fraser came to value both her freedom and the pain that had come along with it. Her injuries, like those done to the great scarred trees around her, were actually a testament to the hidden beauty of life itself—and to the choice to either live in fear or "look for [the] gifts" in every experience, no matter how painful.
A poignant study of gratitude for the simple life.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61902-113-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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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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