by Monica Holloway ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2007
For funeral-home-cum-dysfunctional-family tales, stick with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (June 2006).
An uneven first memoir offers more undigested anger than wisdom.
Holloway was fixated on death from a young age. Her friend Julie’s parents owned a funeral home, and Holloway liked to sneak into her favorite coffin, lined with pink silk, and imagine her own funeral. Kids with happy childhoods, of course, don’t spend much time thinking about their funerals, and Holloway’s interest in death is something of an escape from her horrible family life. Holloway’s father is abusive, sometimes beating his wife so brutally that the kids fear for her life. Eventually, Holloway’s mother summons some resolve, signs up for college classes and kicks her husband out. But Holloway does not offer the expected my-mother-is-a-phoenix line. No, mom turns out to be thoroughly self-absorbed, and deeply limited in her ability to love her children. Besotted with her new boyfriend, she virtually abandons her daughter, leaving her to make her way through adolescence on her own: “Can’t you be happy for me?” mom asks her teenage daughter. “Why is everything about you? . . . I’ve done you my whole life. This is about me.” Sections of this memoir are eerily lovely, but the overall narrative doesn’t hold together. The funerary imagery that suffuses the opening chapters feels distractingly like a device, a symbol that, in the final analysis, doesn’t have much to do with the family drama. The final third of the book, in which an adult Holloway finally reckons with her childhood, seems like an entirely different book—the voice is different, and the elegant prose of the beginning is replaced by clichés (“Sobs finally came. I didn’t think they ever would”) and self-help psycho-babble (“There was no other way for her to recover but to let the memories come, and I couldn’t do that for her”).
For funeral-home-cum-dysfunctional-family tales, stick with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (June 2006).Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-4169-4002-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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