A vivid, compelling account of a life on the edge.
The mother of the 18-year-old killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 relates the saga of her life in the St. Louis suburb, expressing her love for her children on nearly every page.
With assistance from LeFlore, McSpadden reveals her life conversationally, including the colloquial phrasings that pepper her speech. Growing up, the author’s fascination with an older high school classmate led to pregnancy at age 15 and the birth of Michael Brown nine months later. From the start, McSpadden referred to her child as "Mike Mike" and does so throughout the memoir. Brown’s death, which gained international attention, does not become the focus until more than 200 pages in. Before that, McSpadden details her life as a black female in a sometimes-racist, sometimes-supportive metropolitan area with a longstanding reputation for unequal treatment of minorities. She offers bright portrayals of her mother and mostly undependable biological father, plus dozens of other relatives, friends, and antagonists. Determined to earn her high school diploma, McSpadden eventually had to drop out to care for Mike Mike and labor at a variety of low-wage jobs. She is frank about the domestic violence she endured at the hands of the man who fathered her first two children and another man (since murdered) who fathered her third and fourth children. Unable to find satisfactory housing arrangements, the author chronicles the dizzying number of moves within the St. Louis region, sometimes commenting on the varying levels of racial segregation in each area. Eventually, McSpadden describes the apartment complex where Mike Mike was staying with his grandmother the day of his death. Regarding the controversial shooting, the author casts doubt on the robbery report involving her son, and she suggests that Mike Mike's companion during the altercation is lying about the details. Mostly, though, she chronicles her unsuccessful quest for justice within a law enforcement culture stacked against her.
A vivid, compelling account of a life on the edge.Pub Date: May 10, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-942872-52-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Regan Arts
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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
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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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