by Luisita López Torregrosa ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 5, 2004
Bittersweet and beautifully written.
New York Times editor Torregrosa’s debut recalls with rueful affection an unsettled childhood in a tropical paradise.
In graceful prose, the author movingly relates how her love for a place, Puerto Rico, and a parent, her mother, was affected when her family fell apart and she fled the island to avoid witnessing the consequences. The prologue describes a family reunion after her mother’s sudden death in 1994; gathered for María Luisa’s funeral in Texas, where she lived for more than 30 years with her second husband, her children talk about their past, their family, and their relations with one another. María Luisa had seven children, six by her Puerto Rican first husband and a seventh with her American spouse. Torregrosa, the oldest, was closest to sister Angeles, later a high-level Sandinista, and brother Amaury. The three bore the brunt of their father’s abusive behavior before their mother finally divorced him. Torregrosa vividly evokes the pace and texture of Puerto Rican life, “furious winds and hot rains, a place of trammeled beauty.” She describes the places where the family lived, San Juan as well as small country towns, as her father developed his medical practice. Beautiful and clever María Luisa belonged to a distinguished family and had been a lawyer before she fell passionately in love and married a man with whom she had little in common. Amaury, from a lower social class, expected his wife to be a dutiful homebody while he stayed out at night drinking and womanizing. Torrregrosa watched angrily as her mother waited up for him and endured his abuse of her and the children. By the time the author was 16, she had decided she wanted to write and live in the US, where she had gone to school, to get as far away from the family as possible. Yet she encounters prejudice as a Puerto Rican and a lesbian while she struggles to make a life of her own in America.
Bittersweet and beautifully written.Pub Date: March 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-053460-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Rayo/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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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