An often revealing book about a search for spiritual solace.
A woman diagnosed with breast cancer receives spiritual comfort and support from generations of female ancestors in this debut memoir.
In her introduction, Dobbe outlines the factors that helped her to face the most challenging period of her life with courage and determination. She did so, she says, by exploring “the gloomiest as well as the most glorious parts of my soul.” She asserts that her deep connection to numerous past and present female relatives helped to guide her on her journey. These included her sister, who received a diagnosis of cancer before Dobbe received her own; the spirit of her late mother, whose near-death experience during a World War II bombing in the Netherlands, she says, left her with psychic abilities; and her grandmother, whose spirit lovingly teaches the author, decades after her own death from breast cancer. Dobbe, an acupuncturist and tulip farmer, writes that she’s keenly attuned to both the mystical rhythms of nature and the possibilities of alternative methods of medical treatment. She says that she helped to ease her sister Coby’s suffering with plant-based remedies, such as curcuma and cat’s-claw, and that she finds her own comfort and spiritual guidance from meditating among trees. When family divisions surface after Coby’s death, Dobbe negotiates them by entering “the sacred circle” with the spirits of her sister and other “women of my tribe,” where she receives loving advice about mending damaged connections. The author’s tone is warm and enthusiastic throughout this work, and her journey through her family history is compellingly intimate; for example, she espouses the theory that one’s ancestors’ trauma gets embedded in one’s genetic code, so that in this remembrance, she’s exploring her own inherited pain. Some readers may need to suspend their disbelief, though, when she recounts her psychic experiences; the language of members of Dobbe’s aforementioned tribe, for example, sometimes sounds a bit like modern psychotherapists’, as when one explains the author’s grandmother’s pain as being “a compilation of mental and emotional experiences.” Overall, however, the narrative offers a tender portrait of human suffering.
An often revealing book about a search for spiritual solace.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5043-9835-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2018
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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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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