by Mary Jane Black ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2019
In bald prose, a powerful biker love story centered around Harley-Davidson motorcycles.
Black’s debut memoir chronicles her escape from an abusive husband into the arms of a man from whom she learns the joy of deep love—and motorcycling.
It was 1995, and Black was looking around the partially empty house, where she “first came as an eighteen-year-old bride.” She was never in love with her husband, Tom, but sought “safety from the battlefield of [her] parents’ marriage.” This would be her second attempt at leaving. The first time, she had told her son, Steven, who told his father. “It had cost [her] bruised ribs and a twisted arm.” This time she took only Stephanie, her 15-year-old daughter, with her and began her new life. Reluctantly, she accepted a blind-date invitation for dinner with her friend Vicky; Vicky’s boyfriend, Tod; and Dwayne, a gregarious Texan. And so began an interesting and complicated love story. A whirlwind courtship of letters, daily calls, and 600-mile trips between Missouri and Texas followed. Black was a schoolteacher and Dwayne a Harley motorcycle mechanic. Eventually, she moved to Texas. After they married, he taught her how to ride a motorcycle, rebuilding a 1980 Harley for her to join him on his weekend rides. Secondary characters, including Dwayne’s mother and daughter and Black’s children, offer an inside peek into biker life and provide context for understanding the couple’s absolute devotion to one another. It’s a compelling narrative, despite Black’s unimaginative just-the-facts-style prose: e.g., “We pull into his driveway….He carries my suitcase into the rusty trailer….I follow him. We stand by his bed.” They were two damaged souls; she from a 23-year loveless marriage, a father who committed suicide, and a mother who ran out on her; he, a twice-divorced Vietnam vet contending with his own demons of low self-esteem (“You deserve better…than a half-assed mechanic who doesn’t have a real job”). Their shared love healed both. Black’s wholehearted adoption of Dwayne’s passion for Harley motorcycles was the finishing touch that bound their relationship. Have a box of tissues ready for the heartbreaking, poignant ending.
In bald prose, a powerful biker love story centered around Harley-Davidson motorcycles.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63152-620-6
Page Count: 232
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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