An often evocative and lyrical reflection on family mysteries.
Myers’ (Don’t Call Me Mother, 2013, etc.) second memoir traces a difficult family history, set against the sweeping landscape of the Great Plains.
As a child, the author learned that she could find temporary solace through music by playing the cello; later, as an adult, she expressed her innermost feelings through her paintings; and finally, in midlife, she became a therapist and discovered the cathartic healing of memoir writing. She has spent decades researching her maternal family history, trying to understand what caused her mother, Jo’tine, to hand her over to her grandmother, Frances (nicknamed “Lulu”), to raise—and what caused Lulu to give Jo’tine to her own grandmother, Josephine, for many critical years. Myers was 4 years old when she began living with Lulu, who, with one interruption, would raise her until she left for college. When she was 5, however, she lived with her cousin’s family, where she remained for a year. It was there, she says, that she was first sexually abused. Jo’tine and Frances, she writes, had a troubled relationship that was never resolved, and although Lulu was a nurturing, loving caregiver during Myers’ early years, she became increasingly strict and demanding as the years progressed—even resorting to beatings, according to the author. The deeply emotional narrative has a tendency toward repetition, and readers are likely to grow impatient as they wait for the author to state what they’ll have already surmised—that her mother and grandmother both suffered from mental illness. But the volume does intricately layer the detailed narrative with philosophical and mystical musings as well as poetic passages regarding Myers’ relationship with her Great Plains surroundings: “There was always the wind. It whirled and swirled, kicking up dust and revealing, if we cared to look for it, secrets just under the surface, particles of bone and earth that shimmered from the great inland sea that covered mid-America thousands of years ago.”
An often evocative and lyrical reflection on family mysteries.Pub Date: June 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63152-216-1
Page Count: 330
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2017
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
