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
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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