An eventful, flawed story of self-empowerment from a young woman.
A young Rwandese woman in New York City recounts homelessness, luxury and everything in between in this coming-of-age memoir.
Four-year-old Josi Marie fled Rwanda in the middle of the night, escaping a gruesome genocide. Over the next five years, her family of 10 moved from a refugee camp in Zaire to a small two-bedroom, no-bathroom apartment and then on to Kenya. Despite financial hardships, Josi flourished. She joined a renowned dance troupe and performed at lavish venues. It was a dream she still yearned for years later, when she was a teenager living in East Dayton, Ohio. She felt misunderstood, torn between Rwanda and America. But she also felt that neither entirely suited her. Against her parents’ will, she moved to New York City. There, her good looks attracted rich older men who spoiled her, and she hobnobbed with models and hip-hop stars. But supporting herself in the city had its drawbacks, and Josi spent one summer homeless, crashing on couches and stairwells. Success came eventually, on the surface at least, but the author’s inner turmoil persisted. Her honest memoir reveals a woman who is smart, resourceful and confident. Her breadth of experience is unusual, but her psychological journey to adulthood is not, making her tale captivating and relatable. While the prose is conversational and competent, there are minor issues with tense shifts and repetition. Despite her difficult childhood, it’s hard to sympathize with the narrator. She’s not shy about extolling her virtues and insists that even when broke and jobless, she never worried or felt afraid, since “struggling only plants characteristics within you that make you stronger, courageous, ambitious, and hungry for more.” It’s an enviable quality, and the author uses it to turn her book into a self-help manifesto of sorts.
An eventful, flawed story of self-empowerment from a young woman.Pub Date: April 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475068344
Page Count: 166
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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