An account of the American dream gone wrong that alternates wildly between the troubling and the uplifting.
An immigrant struggles with health and employment issues before finding hope in her faith.
Born and raised with six siblings in Guyana, the only English-speaking country in South America, debut author Edwards and her family immigrated to New York in the mid 1980s in search of prosperity. Instead, her educated parents, who were soundly middle class in Guyana, found themselves working menial jobs as nannies and security guards—a cycle of underemployment that Edwards herself would confront after graduating from college and moving to Atlanta. For years, she would seek a job as a copy editor to no avail: “Surely, I was qualified and skilled to work in my field, but somehow nothing opened up.” Edwards soon set her mind to moving to Florida, but before she could actualize her vision of a sunnier, happier existence as a teacher, she found a lump in her left breast. Without health insurance, she sought local clinics to have a lumpectomy but went more than a year with no follow-up visits. Although she created a new life in Florida, it was marred by horrible students and a cancer that had spread through her bones. By the book’s end, Edwards discovers support and relief in her Christian faith, but her story always returns to the many disappointments she suffered in the United States. “The rules of the game had changed,” she writes of the American dream, “and I evidently never got an update.” The theme of an immigrant’s plans becoming derailed by timely social issues like health insurance and hiring freezes should resonate strongly with readers. But Edwards never fleshes out her recollection. It remains unclear if she intends her story to be an American tragedy or a Christian tale of triumph filled with traumatic elements. Her tendency to use verbose, academic language also gets in the way of clarifying her objective (“I considered the entrapment of being in a cultural dichotomy where younger immigrants contended with the dissonance of living through our parents’ worldview or adopting that of the new world”). In addition, truly upsetting moments—like her decision to shrug off the cancer destroying her body or the sudden, unexplained death of her brother—certainly don’t help to guide this memoir, which is in great need of a clearer direction.
An account of the American dream gone wrong that alternates wildly between the troubling and the uplifting.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5127-1269-8
Page Count: 70
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2017
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
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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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