A fierce and fact-filled love story with few holds barred.
Two skilled journalists collaborate on the most personal of stories: their extremely premature daughter’s struggle to survive.
Thomas French (Zoo Story: Life in the Garden of Captives, 2010, etc.), who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 1998, and Kelley French (Journalism/Indiana Univ.), who launched this project with the series “Never Let Go” (a Pulitzer nominee) in the Tampa Bay Times, write alternate chapters in their latest book. Before the daughter appears in the narrative, the authors set the stage for her arrival by telling of Kelley’s longing for a baby, the couple’s late-blooming, on-again, off-again romance, their failed attempts to conceive a child, their decision to use donor eggs, Kelley’s pregnancy, and Juniper’s cesarean delivery four months early. Knowing that her chances of survival were slim, the Frenches opted to ask the doctors to try, and the rest of their story is set primarily in All Children’s Hospital’s neonatal care unit. Thomas’ chapters reflect the fact that as a journalist, he kept extensive daily notes of his observations and his actions (he read Harry Potter aloud and played Bruce Springsteen songs to Juniper) in the unit during those long months; Kelley’s, which include portions of her Times series, are less specific and more reflective. The authors also provide a capsule history of neonatal care. Inevitably, there are crises, times when death seems close, but with a photograph of a toddler on the cover, readers are spared the suspense suffered by the parents. The authors raise questions about the enormous cost of saving a single life when the same funds could provide health care for countless children, and they are aware of the great risks of permanent damage to an extreme preemie undergoing lifesaving procedures. But for them, their daughter’s life was priceless, and the risk paid off.
A fierce and fact-filled love story with few holds barred.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-32442-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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