An honest and affecting story of the many complexities involved with family relationships.
A debut memoir about a woman’s emotionally charged relationship with the mother who walked away from her marriage and family.
The youngest of three children, Cistaro was barely out of toddlerhood when her mother got into her Dodge Dart and suddenly drove off. She neither called nor acknowledged her children’s birthdays for the first few years of her absence. Only later would she connect with them, but only for short periods of time. When she did, it was often in the company of different men with whom she shared homes as well as alcohol and drugs. Cistaro’s mother was constantly—and painfully—“just out of…reach” of the children who craved her love. The author and her brothers became each other’s main sources of support, and their father did his imperfect best to hold the family together. However, the children each carried a deep anguish that marked them for life. Both her brothers eventually became substance abusers, while Cistaro narrowly avoided a similar fate. She went on to build a happy, stable marriage and family, but privately, she lived with the constant fear that she carried a “leaving gene” that would cause her to want to abandon her own family. When she learned one Christmas that her mother was dying, all her old fears of being left behind resurfaced. The author went to her mother’s side to “hold [the] body” she had not touched since childhood. During her stay, she discovered letters her mother had written but not sent to Cistaro and her brothers. From them, she gained insight into the powerfully contradictory impulses that drove her mother and that often surfaced in herself. The author finally found peace knowing that while her mother ultimately needed to fly free, Cistaro could embrace “the messy, maddening beauty” that responsibilities brought to her life with equanimity and even joy.
An honest and affecting story of the many complexities involved with family relationships.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4926-1538-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
PROFILES
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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BOOK REVIEW
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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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