Though the family’s plight is overdetailed, the current war with Iraq gives their story particular relevance.
The daughter of a soldier killed in Vietnam graphically chronicles the permanent wounds his death inflicted on his family.
While she honors all those who like her father served their country in that war, Zacharias is more intent on writing about the pain that war inflicts, not its inherent morality. In the summer of 1966, when she learned of her husband’s death, Shelby Spears was living in a trailer in rural Tennessee with son Frankie, middle child Karen (the author, then a third-grader), and baby Linda. Shelby dropped out of tenth grade in 1953 to marry David, a career soldier who reached the rank of staff sergeant. She liked life as a military wife: she enjoyed being stationed in places like Germany and Hawaii; she found that other families on the bases were always supportive; and health services and schooling were readily available. After David’s death, however, her own family was little help as she struggled with her grief and the problems of raising three children on her own. Zacharias describes moving to Georgia and living in a succession of dingy trailer courts while her mother completed high school, went on to nursing school, and finally earned enough to buy a house for the family. But her success came at considerable cost. Shelby had a number of affairs, often bringing strangers home at night. She left the children alone to fend for themselves while she worked or partied. And she never talked about their father, which hurt the most. Frank turned to drugs, and Karen, though a devout Christian, became pregnant in high school and had an abortion. The family survived, but it was a long and rough haul. They remained haunted by their father’s death, which Zacharias hints may have resulted from friendly fire. The author continues to be active in Vietnam veterans’ affairs.
Though the family’s plight is overdetailed, the current war with Iraq gives their story particular relevance.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-072148-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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