An engaging, true story of one family’s turmoil in 1970s Brazil.
In this creative retelling of a true story, Kelley writes of her family’s international financial crisis.
In the early 1970s, the author, her husband, Jack, and their four daughters moved from Greenwich, Connecticut, to Brazil. Jack had recently lost his broadcasting job, and his former employers were cruelly keeping him out of the industry. He met a tenacious yet mysterious man named Jerry Green and seized an opportunity to join his business ventures, which included gold mining, logging, shrimping and selling beef. Jerry’s ideas were numerous, as were his connections; according to the author, he was a war hero with ties to the CIA, Brazilian officials and possibly the mob. After Jerry took Jack on a tour to see the enterprises firsthand, Jack agreed to invest $40,000—without Marilyn’s knowledge. Jerry helped Jack find an American school in Rio de Janeiro for his oldest daughters, Lynne and Evan. The girls found fun and freedom in Brazil while their mother, back in Connecticut, packed up the family’s belongings and prepared to sell their house. Meanwhile, Jerry was frequently out of touch, causing Jack to worry as he prepared to resettle his family and solidify his gold-trading prospects. But soon after Marilyn and the youngest girls, Diane and Heather, came to Rio, Jerry’s shadiness came to light. It turned out that he wasn’t planning to share any profits—or give the Kelleys their money back. The Kelleys pursued several avenues, including alerting the Brazilian authorities and the FBI; they even got in touch with Brazilian gangsters who wanted to see Jerry dead. Finally, they found an unexpected method of retribution. This harrowing tale of a family determined to survive in a new country offers exciting plane rides, gripping chases and a glimpse into international relations in the 1970s. Kelley tells the story through each family member’s perspective, and although readers may find Jerry’s shadiness immediately apparent, it’s also made clear that Jack needed a way to support his family and that Jerry shared information that made him seem trustworthy. The author also shows the beauty and fierceness of Brazil (“Rolling waves, like a fierce battalion of oncoming soldiers, pounded the sand with roaring force”) as she and her husband worked to keep their family afloat.
An engaging, true story of one family’s turmoil in 1970s Brazil.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484809129
Page Count: 370
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
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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