A powerful, emotionally resonant memoir of a young boy’s bout with cancer as experienced by his devoted mother.
A mother’s perspective on her son’s harrowing bout with lymphoma.
As French author Marzouk relates in her English-language debut, what started out as a sore throat escalated into something far more dangerous for 10-year-old Solal. When his tonsil had black streaks on it, his parents knew they needed professional help. Of course, they were blindsided by the diagnosis of cancer. The author and her husband were suddenly thrust into a different world as Solal moved into the Curie Institute in Paris for treatments. Because they had two other children who needed them, they also had to maintain some semblance of normalcy throughout the long months ahead. Marzouk delivers this tender memoir via two points of view: first person, which gives readers her immediate, often visceral reactions to such things as the doctor’s first analysis of Solal’s prognosis and Solal’s hair beginning to fall out due to chemotherapy; and third person, which gives a wider perspective of events and includes Solal’s reactions. The author skillfully deploys telling details, and her descriptions of what Solal endured and how she felt puts readers into the same space as the family, creating a narrative that is sometimes overwhelmingly intense. The author’s determination and sheer willpower to endure this ordeal shine through on nearly every page. For those who have been touched by cancer, the book will bring back memories of treatments and sickness, of fears and sadness, and of joy and hope. “You’re here,” she writes in conclusion. “I’m not making it up. You really are here. Freed from the Institute and its machines with their gloomy notes. And so I sing in order to forget, to forget the risks you still run, forget my fear, forget uncertainty. Yes, Solal, we must sing, we must keep singing obstinately. But even so, what if? What if? In spite of everything, there’s always an if.”
A powerful, emotionally resonant memoir of a young boy’s bout with cancer as experienced by his devoted mother.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59051-097-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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