An engaging story of a mother, divorcee, dancer, poet and student looking to find peace.
A woman’s memoir of her journey from bad marriages to independence and love.
This debut follows a free-spirited mother looking for freedom and a fulfilling love life in a male-dominated society. In May 1977, Lynn finds herself in her third crumbling marriage, this time to an abusive, possessive man named Paolo. Her sons from previous marriages live with their fathers due to Paolo’s strict ways and Lynn’s inability to provide a comfortable life for them. After supporting Paolo through school during their seven-year marriage, Lynn finally pursues her passion as a drama major at the University of California, Berkeley. While Lynn fights for custody of their 6-year-old daughter and struggles to reclaim her old Victorian house, she’s forced to drop out of school. Lynn’s drama studies spark her interest in females of Greek mythology and make her analyze her own life in 1960s and ’70s California. Lynn wants to live her life without a man, but it would take spiritual and emotional work. Her poetry and meditation sustain her, but her need to pay for her divorce from Paolo forces her to work as an exotic dancer at the Garden of Eden. Lynn takes Marika to visit her friend in Bodega Bay, Calif., where they experience a simpler life camping out in a van near the beach. Eventually, Lynn, in desperation, moves in with her mother and stepfather near Berkeley and gets a job at a paint store, where she meets a drummer/painter named Joe. She slowly learns that time and patience can yield a relationship with a man that isn’t built on lust or financial need. The author’s prose is lyrical and philosophical, exploring lessons she learned from Greek dramas and the feminist teachings of poets and activists in 1970s Berkeley. Her experience as a poet shines through: “Dance and song and poems began to flow into the river of suppressed tears that began first as a trickle and merged into tumbling rapids. This was not pain or joy; it was the unnamed sensation of commitment to my own inner truth.” The author continuously describes the spiritual experiences that allowed her to release her anger and frustration. Overall, the book is a resonant portrayal of one woman’s experience in the ’60s and ’70s.
An engaging story of a mother, divorcee, dancer, poet and student looking to find peace.Pub Date: May 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482656923
Page Count: 538
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2013
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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