An absorbing, sharply observed memoir.
Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist Ellison (The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter, 2005, etc.) writes about her life on the ADHD battlefront.
When the author’s son Buzz entered second grade, her world began to collapse as he became more unmanageable at home and in school. Forced to admit that something was seriously wrong, Ellison heeded school authorities who were urging her to seek psychiatric help for her son, despite her initial reluctance to medicate him. Not only was her son’s behavior becoming increasingly uncontrollable, but she realized that she was exacerbating his problems by her tendency to fly off the handle when provoked. She wondered if he inherited his ADHD, “the hallmark obsession of our frazzled era,” from her, and she examined her career, which was filled with “heady success” but built upon “constant cravings for conflict and caffeine” and marred by a number of careless blunders. After both she and her son received a positive diagnosis, Ellison decided to spend a year exploring a range of treatments—medication, therapy and family counseling, meditation, biofeedback—to fully understand the pitfalls of her interaction with her sons. Although she is no longer an opponent of medication, from which her son benefitted, she is still critical of the failure of the one-size-fits-all public-education model, made more problematic by staff cutbacks and increasing class sizes. Despite the fact that she did not find a silver-bullet cure, Ellison sums up her year as positive: Buzz has had fewer outbursts at home and at school, and she has learned to slow down and not react negatively to his provocations.
An absorbing, sharply observed memoir.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4013-4088-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Voice/Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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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