A penetrating, emotionally honest look at the aftermath of suicide, ideal for sharing with others who grieve.
A Virginia woman whose 17-year-old daughter committed suicide explores issues of faith and grief in this excellent debut.
One Sunday morning in 1995, Antus and her husband left home to attend a monthly meeting with their community of secular Carmelites—“Catholics living in the world who agree to pray silently twice a day.” That afternoon, they returned to find daughter Mary on her bed having a seizure. From the empty bottle of antidepressant pills and other objects around her, along with a suicide note, it was clear she’d tried to kill herself. Her father, a doctor, administered CPR while an ambulance was en route, but Mary didn’t survive. Those who’ve lost someone to suicide won’t be surprised by the questions the couple agonized over: why did Mary kill herself? Did they miss the signs? Because their son suffered from schizoaffective disorder, were they doing enough to protect him? A gifted writer, Antus sugarcoats nothing, from her anger at Mary for taking her life to her own frustration with funeral home visitors who said Mary was “in a better place.” The book often references the family’s Catholic faith, and those from other faith traditions may be unfamiliar with, say, the Canticle of Zechariah at Morning Prayer. Readers of any faith or no faith, however, can relate to the overwhelming grief that often accompanies a loved one’s death, especially if death occurs by suicide. Antus later decided to complete her master’s degree and write her thesis on suicide and the Catholic community; readers have to admire her resolve as she continues to explore the topic. In a concluding paragraph, she says, “God had nothing at all to do with Mary’s illness and suicide, neither causing nor allowing them, and everything to do with loving her.” This particular analysis seems rushed and could bear further discussion, but otherwise, the author adeptly shares the expansive emotions that followed her daughter’s death and the hope her family found along the way.
A penetrating, emotionally honest look at the aftermath of suicide, ideal for sharing with others who grieve.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1501041181
Page Count: 226
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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