A memoir that effectively conjures the world of an immigrant but offers pat answers to complex problems.
Kartheiser’s (Laptopiada, 2016, etc.) memoir offers a portrait of the Georgian-American immigrant experience in its story of a single mother who comes to the United States.
The book opens in 2004 with the then-34-year-old author frantically getting into a taxi and ordering the driver to tear through the streets of Tbilisi, Georgia. She had just two hours to locate her sons and get their passport photos taken before a 1 p.m. appointment at the United States consulate to secure visas. She was barely eking out a living in her native country and desperate to find a way out. Her book offers a tableau of the day-to-day headaches and upsets that she encountered on her quest for financial security and personal fulfillment. She provides recollections of Communist rule in Georgia, tales of the old country before it, and reflections on the country’s long, complicated history that outsiders rarely hear. The author traveled back and forth between Georgia and the United States, staying and working in America for six-month periods, separated from her family back home. She worked as a babysitter and housekeeper, which made her feel as if she was losing her identity. Still, she stayed positive: “When life gives you challenges, you have no choice—you have to fight.” At times, it seems as if Kartheiser is trying to find the most painless way to conjure the idea of an immigrant’s divided soul; for instance, she refrains from stirring up too many negative emotions—fear, rage, remorse, envy, despair. She also glosses over potentially volatile scenes that a more experienced writer wouldn’t, such as a recollection of the September morning that she turned on the television to see smoke overtaking a skyscraper. This relatively quiet 9/11 scene had great dramatic potential, but the author offers a facile conclusion: “For me, [9/11] is the worst experience of my American journey. The beacon of hope...has been attacked, in an attempt to destroy that hope. But...the people of the United States only become more caring of each other, and more patriotic to their nation.”
A memoir that effectively conjures the world of an immigrant but offers pat answers to complex problems.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5484-8328-9
Page Count: 204
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2018
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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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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