A unique perspective on a harrowing Greek odyssey.
In this memoir, a mother recalls a two-year struggle to retrieve her abducted children from her ex-husband overseas.
In mid-March 1994, Meredith (When Push Comes to Shove, 2015, etc.) writes, her former spouse kidnapped their two young daughters from Alaska and took them to his native country of Greece. Over the next two years, she tried to locate the girls and bring them back to her Alaska home, all while navigating a bureaucratic and legal labyrinth in a foreign culture. This book is a remarkably eloquent and harrowing account of a journey that would tax any parent. “Get ready for the fight of your life, kid,” her boss at a battered women’s shelter warned her. “There won’t be a quick fix for this one.” Betty Mahmoody’s Not Without My Daughter (1987) navigated similar territory, but Meredith brings a unique perspective to her story, shaped by her own childhood. She says that her mother—who “fancied herself a Hollywood starlet waiting to be discovered”—abandoned her when she was 13. “She unloaded her stress on the children before she began unloading the children themselves,” the author notes with typical bluntness. The author didn’t want her own daughter “growing up in a broken home like I did,” but her marriage ended in March 1990 after, she says, her husband tried to strangle her. She was awarded custody of their two girls but that didn’t prevent him from kidnapping them four years later, she writes. “Not even the electric chair or a lifetime in jail would keep me from blowing your brains out if you ever come close to the girls again,” she says that he told her after she made an initial, abortive trip to Greece to retrieve them. Meredith draws readers into her excruciating quest with her command of detail and language: the wife of one of her Greek lawyers is “inexplicably comforting to look at, like a human quilt,” and an American expatriate married to a Greek man lives in a home that “comes with all the amenities, including his mother and his childhood furnishings.” The author encounters one obstacle after another, including being arrested in Greece and then sued by her ex-husband for violating a Greek custody order. The book’s conclusion could hardly be a more resounding tribute to the human spirit.
A unique perspective on a harrowing Greek odyssey.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-834-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 4, 2016
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
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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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