A lively, often insightful exploration of the many roles that death can play in life.
A memoir of sisterly conflict and forgiveness, framed by the challenges of terminal illness.
In this debut, Kaplan passes along the hard-won wisdom of her deceased sister and brother-in-law, who both succumbed to cancer after years of being caregivers for each other. On its surface, this is a family memoir, detailing the unbreakable bonds and fierce rivalries of the author and her sister, Lois. Kaplan offers occasional snippets of telling dialogue and evocative imagery but relies mostly on description rather than action; of her conflicted relationship with Lois, for example, she writes: “Lois, my blood, and Lois, my betrayer—connection and pain.” She outlines her relationship with her sister and the rest of their family over many years, touching on a series of fights, reconciliations and toxic boyfriends. The book shines, however, in the middle sections, which focus on Lois’ and her husband Dave’s repeated cancer diagnoses and the coping mechanisms that they developed. They viewed their experiences with cancer as “destiny playing out,” and Kaplan’s analysis of their surprises and joys is a refreshingly honest examination of death and of our culture’s treatment of it. In one of several insightful passages, she writes: “Loss was the opposite of something to get past; it became the ultimate transformational opportunity.” Sometimes, however, the book reads a bit too much like a transcript of a therapy session: “I found myself more alone than ever and realized how much I’d needed my dad as a little girl.” It’s also overlong and often plagued by extraneous detail; a final section on the author’s decision to write the book, for example, feels particularly tacked-on. Still, when the memoir narrows its focus to the interwoven forces of love and death, it offers readers a powerfully hopeful perspective.
A lively, often insightful exploration of the many roles that death can play in life.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1493740390
Page Count: 252
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
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
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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