A split-focus but readable account of learning and growing in the midst of life’s changes.
A hybrid work combines a tale about a girl sold into slavery and an account of a young woman— the author—who becomes a physician.
This sequel from Moore (Between Two Minds, 2012) sets up an intertwined pair of narratives, one fiction and the other nonfiction. The nonfiction storyline involves the author herself and relates her life story, from growing up in various places—including Lincoln, Nebraska, and Montgomery, Alabama—to getting married, having children, and attending medical school. The fictional narrative tells the tale of a young Hopi girl named Talking Bird and her brother, Little Fox, who are kidnapped by Mexican slave traders and befriended by a kindly Franciscan called Padre Diego. The two are given Christian names—Rosita and Carlitos—and they are eventually sold to a wealthy pueblo merchant. Along the way, the siblings encounter many people telling them wondrous stories of many faiths, including a well-traveled missionary named Padre Bachelot (who explains the spiritual beliefs of the natives of Hawaii) and, much later, a man who informs an older, married Rosa about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In this work, Moore does two things equally well. Through the experiences of Rosa, she crafts a detailed historical-novel-within-a-memoir about the early settler history of California and the events of the character’s life there. And the author uses her own story to illustrate lessons she’s learned in a career of practicing medicine and thinking about life. Some of these lessons are debatable, as when she asserts that “the deepest, most harmful war is within our own minds.” But others, although commonplace, are worth remembering: “Change is often scary, but change is part of life and necessary for growth.” The dual narrative choice can often be distracting because the work does only the thinnest of jobs connecting the two. But each separate thread is intriguing on its own merits, and both share an open-minded attitude toward the twists and turns of fate.
A split-focus but readable account of learning and growing in the midst of life’s changes.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-982213-48-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2019
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
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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