A sensitive but self-important memoir of an outsider's life in one of Iowa's Amish communities. Poet Swander makes her second foray into nonfiction (coauthor, Parsnips in the Snow, not reviewed, etc.) with this account of the hardships and rewards of living off the land when severe allergies to virtually all nonorganic food forced her into a one-room schoolhouse among an enduringly enigmatic group of simple folk. Depicting her life from childhood on, she offers many examples of her longstanding difficulties with food: falling asleep at the kitchen table when her mother demanded she sit there until she'd cleaned her plate, inexplicable rashes and sinus headaches when she tried to grow out of her picky eating habits as an adult, a diagnosis in her 20s of an intolerance to milk and eggs, and then, when her allergies worsened in her 30s, mistreatment by an allergist that almost killed her and left her unable to consume anything except strictly organic food she had previously ``eaten only infrequently or never at all.'' Swander entertains with her quest to find tolerable foods (frogs legs, bear, road kill, etc.) but soon reveals that her allergies extend even farther, to most things synthetic, like toothpaste and man-made fibers. Readers would certainly rally behind Swander's valiant effort to reconstruct her life with ``environmental illness'' if only she didn't lapse into judgment and self-pity: She blames being single on her disease because men expected her to cook ``normal meals'' for them, she rages against the inconvenience of having to ask friends not to wear perfume into her home, she lectures on global warming. Some relief from this tirade is offered by her straightforward and detailed observation of the Amish, but these welcome interludes are few and far between. (Another report on environmental illness is Myrna and Heather Millar's The Toxic Labyrinth, p. 616.) Pass over the world-peace pedantry for the rare but lucid insights on one of this county's misunderstood cultures.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-85808-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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