A flawed but uplifting story of courage, love and compassion.
A survivor of 9/11 recounts the ultra–harrowing tale of how she returned from the brink of death after suffering second- and third-degree burns over more than 80 percent of her body.
The first quarter of the book is a banal recitation of the privileged though unremarkable life that Manning led prior to the day in 2001 that changed her and her country. But when the author begins to describe the horrific moments following her encounter with the fire in the lobby of One World Trade Center that “embraced my body tighter that any suitor,” her memoir takes flight. With honesty and simplicity, Manning details her miraculous escapes first from the crippled North Tower; then from limb amputation; and then from death, which stalked her relentlessly for three months. “I had about 18% chance of surviving, assuming I suffered no dire infections or other complications,” she writes. Her once-comfortable life had suddenly become a living hell. After dozens of surgeries, skin grafts and excruciatingly painful therapies, Manning began the difficult process of relearning “the simplest of activities, basic functions I had always taken for granted such as speaking, holding a fork to feed myself, sitting up, getting in and out of bed and walking.” Ten years later, her life has returned to “normality” thanks to the unstinting love shown her by family, friends and strangers. And the hand she thought she would lose has since become a personal “talisman, not of suffering, but of something divine: the power to survive and to heal.”
A flawed but uplifting story of courage, love and compassion.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9463-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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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