A brisk chronicle of a family’s (mis)adventures in Vietnam.
A lighthearted memoir of new friends, delicious food, and culture shock.
Laid off from her job at the Los Angeles Times during the recession of 2008, travel writer Esterhammer realized that she and her self-employed husband could no longer afford their huge mortgage payments and car loans. There was nothing for them to do, she decided, but leave for someplace where they could live cheaply. They sold everything, rented their house, and, with their 8-year-old autistic son, moved to Vietnam. In a year, she calculated, they would have saved enough money by teaching English to return home with a comfortable financial cushion. The author portrays herself as cheerful, unflappable, and sometimes too clueless to be believed. She was astonished by the heat and humidity, for example. Completely mistaking the cost of housing, the family wound up in one of Ho Chi Minh City’s poorest districts, in a tiny, cockroach-infested house crammed into a noisy, dirty, densely populated neighborhood where daylong power outages are common. Esterhammer also underestimated the challenges of homeschooling their son, whose attention problems and constant talking proved overwhelming. Months after settling in, she “began to wonder why the loss of something as temporal as my material possessions and job had caused me to turn and run away so quickly.” She paints affectionate portraits of the kind neighbors who looked out for her, helping her to learn Vietnamese, teaching her how to shop and cook, and sharing with her stories of the extreme deprivation they suffered growing up; apparently, she knew little about the reality of postwar life. She was shocked both by their reminiscences and lack of “anger, resentment, or defeat.” Although she wants to convey an image of cool adventurousness, she admits that the real reason she left was not because of money but “to avoid my own embarrassment”; she preferred that friends think she was daring and impetuous than to “see what losers we were.”
A brisk chronicle of a family’s (mis)adventures in Vietnam.Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-938849-97-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Prospect Park Books
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
