by Lillian Faderman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 12, 2003
Relentlessly honest and perceptive, but also loving toward an emotionally frail parent.
Noted gay-studies scholar Faderman (To Believe in Women, 1999, etc.) crafts one of those rare autobiographies that conscientiously detail the temptations of destructive behavior while also celebrating the resilience of the human spirit.
Indeed, this is a classic tale of the child of an immigrant who gets to live the American dream that eluded her mother. Faderman was born in the Bronx in 1940, the only child of an unwed Polish immigrant who came to the Bronx with her sister Rae in 1923. Her father refused to marry her mother or acknowledge Lillian as his daughter, and Faderman soon accepted responsibility for her adored Mommy, woefully unprepared for either a career or maternity and subject to bouts of incapacitating depression, especially after she learned all her relatives had been killed in the Holocaust. Their only solace came from regular moviegoing, and after they joined Rae in Los Angeles in the late ’40s, Lillian decided that she would become a star and rescue her mother from a terrible job and unhappy life. Though she felt betrayed when Mommy married a nice (though odd) Jewish man who worked in a pathology lab, it lightened her burden; Faderman took acting classes and to make money began posing as a teenager for girlie magazines, though she was already cruising women at gay bars. Tempted to drop out of school, she was rescued by a marvelous counselor who pointed out the benefits of education. Though there would be some rough moments—an encounter with a tough lesbian pimp, a brief marriage to an alcoholic gay man, and work as a stripper to pay for her college fees—Faderman was essentially on the road to a distinguished teaching career, a lasting relationship with another female academic, and motherhood (by artificial insemination).
Relentlessly honest and perceptive, but also loving toward an emotionally frail parent.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-12875-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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