An honest, loving account of losing someone and finding them again.
Diaz reflects on the death of his sister Hannah in this debut Christian memoir.
Diaz’s sister Hannah was five years his junior, and though they got along well enough as children, by the time Hannah was 24, Diaz was only speaking to her indirectly, using his mother or his wife as an intermediary. “Some people are givers, and some are takers,” explains the author, who had three young children at the time demanding his full emotional attention. “My sister was a taker, and my solution was to stop giving. It was Hannah’s world, and the rest of us were just living in it.” A challenging personality since the age of 14 and diagnosed with borderline personality disorder at 20, Hannah had spent years drinking, taking drugs, having promiscuous sex, overeating, and self-harming. Not long after yet another spat and tentative reconciliation, Diaz got a voice message from his mother: “Her lips are blue. Come quick.” At first Diaz suspected suicide, but as more facts emerged, the truth of Hannah’s death became unclear. This book represents Diaz’s attempt to find closure in his relationship with his sister. In it, he records the difficulties—and triumphs—of her brief life, interrogating his own mistakes and interpreting the events according to his Christian faith. What emerges is an exploration of regret: both the regret Diaz feels for things he did or did not do and the regrets that plagued Hannah in the final years of her life. Diaz’s prose is imbued with the grief, remorse, empathy, and frustration that one would expect as he recalls the tumultuous nature of his relationship with his sister: “I don’t think I blatantly ignored her as a form of malice. I was doing my best not to respond negatively, but I just ended up not responding at all.” While this sometimes rises to a level of saccharine, the narration is generally grounded and conversational. He approaches the subject with humility, and he manages to portray Hannah in a surprisingly sympathetic light. Diaz sees every tragedy as an opportunity to learn from God—a perspective that seems to serve him well. There may be similar memoirs with more polished narrative structures, but the sincerity that pervades Diaz’s book does much to buoy its emotional impact.
An honest, loving account of losing someone and finding them again.Pub Date: March 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-973657-42-2
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
