“Love the One You’re With” could be the theme song for these poignant, multilayered, pitch-perfect slices of life filled...
Love and loss form myriad combinations in these quirky, funny, ironic, and heartbreaking tales: a third collection from storywriter and novelist Thurm (The Clairvoyant, 1997, etc.).
A rabbi’s wife of ten years announces in front of his entire congregation that she’s leaving him, but when a new woman tempers his desperate yearning, the wife calls to ask for another chance. This dilemma, posed by opening story “Moonlight,” is merely a teaser for the stunning work that follows. “Earthbound” shows Walter grappling with his love for 19-year-old daughter Sunny, who has two children by a high-school sweetheart and now dates a loser who works in a pet shop. Mothers and daughters go at it in “Passenger” (12-year-old Lacey leaves her teacher/cab-driver mom to visit her dad and his new family in California) and in “Jumping Ship” (11-but-looks-14-year-old Noelle cares about nothing except calling her boyfriend while she and her single mother are visiting the grandparents in Florida). Mrs. Sugarman has paid for “Housecleaning” to welcome her asthmatic husband home from the hospital, but the odd couple she’s engaged arrive with their precocious child, fight bitterly, and reveal the most intimate details of their lives, forcing their employer to face her deepest desires. In “Personal Correspondence,” Sam hires lesbian Honey Rose to write thank-you notes after his wife leaves and winds up applying for the position of fathering her child. Thurm finds love everywhere and embraces all relationships: among parents and children, husbands and wives, friends, strangers, and lovers. Her protagonists are bad luck Charlies, likable and empathetic, fumbling through seemingly ordinary lives that Thurm’s deft hand raises to the extraordinary.
“Love the One You’re With” could be the theme song for these poignant, multilayered, pitch-perfect slices of life filled with humanity and hope despite frequent betrayals and abandonments.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-883285-22-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Delphinium
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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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