by Judy Mandel ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2013
Disjointed but dramatic and resonant.
Mandel's account of being her parents' "replacement child" following the death of an older sister she never knew.
On the morning of January 22, 1952, American Airlines flight 6780 crashed into the home in Elizabeth, N.J., where Mandel's parents resided with their two daughters. In addition to killing all 22 passengers and the captain, the accident left the family’s youngest child, 2-year-old Linda, terribly burned, while her 7-year-old sister, Donna, perished in the fire. Former corporate marketing director Mandel reflects on her parents' ensuing grief, guilt and their pervasive sense of loss that, years later, prompted them to have another child: the author. She grew up with constant reminders of the devastating crash, not the least of which were her sister's disfiguring injuries that required innumerable reconstructive surgeries. The narrative moves between time periods as Mandel conjures events on the day of the accident and in the years between the crash and her birth, vignettes from Mandel's childhood and her adult life (including three failed marriages), and imagined scenes between her parents. Describing her mother and father's decision to have another baby, she writes, "the prescription, then, for their own survival was a child conceived to heal the family." Mandel details her perception of her parents' motivation and her conflicted feelings, including resentment and gratitude, about the results of their choice. Most chapters are one to four pages, and the constant cutting between years feels choppy and distracting, but Mandel's story is compelling, and the emotional wreckage in her own life is crystal clear.
Disjointed but dramatic and resonant.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1580054768
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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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