A moving account of how one woman's willpower saved her home and her family.
A woman's journey of survival against many odds.
"Nobody likes a drunk, soon-to-be-divorced, in-debt, swollen-eyed, single mother farmeress," writes Link (Isadore's Secret: Sin, Murder and Confession in a Northern Michigan Town, 2009, etc.) in her down-to-earth, often humorous memoir of her effort to hold onto her farm and her three sons. With "Mr. Wonderful" (her ex) living just across the street, the author chronicles a year's worth of struggles as sole breadwinner, mother and farmer. In a partially refurbished old farmhouse, Link battled the monthly cycle of bills and the impossible task of feeding three teenage boys on her vegetable garden, one pig and a free year's supply of day-old bread, courtesy of the giant-zucchini contest she won. With the death of her beloved horse, her dreams of one kind of life were replaced with another vision and a loneliness that she filled with work and the need to survive. Whether gardening, stealing firewood or shoveling snow, the foursome eked their way through the lack of heat, food and money, juxtaposing days of intense labor with fun-filled moments like cooking marshmallows indoors in the fireplace or finding the perfect Christmas tree. As winter turned to spring and the threat of losing everything hung over her head, Link was forced to make difficult decisions. But tenacity and perseverance prove life can be good, filled with simple joys such as watching her sons grow into hardworking individuals, eating food straight from the ground and collecting eggs from her own hens. And if romance appears at odd moments, so much the better.
A moving account of how one woman's willpower saved her home and her family.Pub Date: June 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-59691-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
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
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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