One of those interior travelogues that, like home movies, are not terribly compelling for outsiders.
A middle-aged woman who moved to Vermont to begin a new life pens an earnest, well-crafted celebration of the discovery of love, self-knowledge, and meaning.
Maloy’s well-intentioned account of a life transformed by love and faith is often an enervating exercise in conventional self-regard; the disappointments of her life are not so different from those of millions of men and women. This is not a dramatic tale of raging passions and horrible hurts but rather a familiar record, conventionally perceived, of the steady drip of the usual blows that leach hope from hearts. Maloy did not get on well with her religion-obsessed mother, and her father remained a distant figure. She married young, divorced, then married another unsuitable man and grew to hate her writing job. By the time she reached her 50s in Pittsburgh, her only joy was her young son Adam, her only hope the God her Quaker said her resided in each individual as a transforming light. But her life changed miraculously one Sunday in 1996 when, after attending a Quaker Meeting, she saw a house and realized she wanted to live there with Adam. Now her life suddenly had purpose. Confident of God’s presence in her life and the fitness of her past as prelude to this moment, she divorced her husband, bought the house, and then met Alan on the Internet. An e-mail courtship led to marriage and life in Vermont, a place Maloy had always considered her true home. Now at peace and braced by faith, she looks back from the perspective of the year beginning in the summer of 1998—as she, Alan, and Adam move into the house—on her past, her adjustments to her marriage, her Quaker faith and pacifist beliefs, and the unfolding seasons.
One of those interior travelogues that, like home movies, are not terribly compelling for outsiders.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58243-145-0
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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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