An absorbing memoir of one birth mother’s experiences, interspersed with an array of narratives, musings, facts, and statistics on the theme of adoption. When Franklin, a literary agent (and a member of the board of directors of the Spence-Chapin adoption agency), became pregnant in 1965, she was a 19-year-old unwed college sophomore. Her family shuffled her off from her home in Virginia to a maternity home in New York City, where relinquishing her baby to adoption was the only option offered her. “We wanted to make right our wrongs and go home,” she writes, but when she gave birth to her son, she was instantly overcome with maternal feelings for him. For years afterward, she suffered feelings of shame, isolation, sadness, and poor self-esteem. The secrecy and silence that cloaked the adoption, contends Franklin, are largely responsible for these feelings. Much of May the Circle Be Unbroken is, in fact, a plea to open adoption records in the US so that searches and reunions between birth parents and adopted children can be facilitated. Searching for and reuniting with their birth parents, states Franklin, helps adoptees attain a sense of wholeness, no matter how well adjusted they are in their adoptive families. Only when Franklin was reunited with her son 27 years later could she begin to recover from the initial trauma or “primal wound” of losing him. Reunion itself, though, is often “an emotional roller coaster” that begins to take on a life of its own. In addition to delicately navigating her relationship with her son, Franklin cautiously establishes a relationship with his adoptive parents, who divorced when he was nine. And Franklin must come to terms with the realization that, although she is her son’s birth mother, the two cannot have the lifelong parenting bond that exists between him and the woman who raised him. A thorough, provocative discourse on just about every aspect of the joys and sorrows of all those involved in the adoption process. (For a look at adoption from the adoptee’s point of view, see Sarah Saffian, Ithaka: A Daughter’s Memoir of Being Found, p. 1365.)
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-517-70755-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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