An honest, nuanced look at what it means to carry on after a traumatic event.
One woman’s account of a harrowing attack in Berkeley, California, and its aftermath.
In 1984, Stefano (The Secret Games of Words, 2015) was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley. She had no luck joining a sorority, although she soon found an intriguing vocation: campus police aide, which involved “patrolling campus and surrounding neighborhoods, calling in suspicious activity.” She saw some unusual things in her time on the job, such as when she directed traffic (including stoned attendees on foot) at a Grateful Dead concert. One night, after leaving work, she was walking home alone and about to enter her apartment when she was threatened by a man with a knife. The attacker pinned her from behind, put his hand over her mouth, and pressed himself against her; he brought the knife up to her throat, but she managed to scream, and he fled. Although the author wasn’t physically injured, the book ably examines the many aftereffects of such an ordeal. She writes of a useless on-campus counseling session with a graduate student and of an unfriendly court system. Later in life, the author became a defense attorney and found herself arguing in court on behalf of people who were accused of crimes not unlike her attacker’s and grilling victims not unlike herself. The book clearly illustrates how life continues after one’s trauma and how strange, unexpected things can happen, as when the author saw her attacker in a grocery store later the same summer; stunned, she thought, “Attackers have to eat too.” The book loses some of its focus in later chapters; for example, regarding a return visit to Berkeley in 2014, she mentions some rather obvious ways that the city had changed (back in 1984, she notes, “No one blogged….There were no paninis, just sandwiches”). Still, later portions yield some potent material. What happened to the man with the knife? The answer, provided here, is chilling.
An honest, nuanced look at what it means to carry on after a traumatic event.Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947856-95-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
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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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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