A poignant, affecting memoir of growing up orphaned and its injurious impact on adulthood. Cournos (Clinical Psychiatry/Columbia Univ.) unfolds with painful honesty the story of a childhood marked by loss. Young Francine barely knew her father, who died after a brief illness when she was three. Within a few years, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. By the time she was 11, the author had seen the cancer devour her mother while everyone around her seemed to deny the illness. Her younger brother had been placed in foster care earlier, and soon after her mother’s death, she and her sister were turned over to the Jewish Child Care Association by close relatives. This final abandonment is today the most perplexing to the author. “I don—t think any amount of reflection will ever allow me to understand why my relatives were so lacking in any sense of empathy or responsibility,” she writes. At the time, 11-year-old Francine assumed she was to blame; being abandoned once again was surely a just punishment for something terrible that she had done. She could only feel valued at school, where her excellence won recognition and respect. Education and perseverance gained her a doctorate and a career as a practicing psychiatrist. This is not the happy ending, however: Surrounded by respectful colleagues, married to a loving, supportive husband, the mother of a vibrant daughter, the adult Cournos suffers a major clinical depression. It worsens from a panic to a debilitating darkness when she refuses to take medication because —[that] would prove what I feared most all along, I—m damaged and defective.” It took Cournos eight months to recover. Now stabilized by Prozac and no longer fearing impending disaster, she finds peace and productivity. Inspiring, insightful, and thoroughly engaging, offering hope and awareness to all who have experienced pivotal losses. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04731-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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