A book written as much or more for the author as for any readership, but those going through similar trials will take much...
A short and powerful evocation of a mother’s death and of the events immediately preceding them.
The cover categorizes this slice of memoir from Becker (Arts/Columbia Univ. School of the Arts) as an “essay,” and it is also described as a “meditation.” The author begins and ends with her mother’s death, cremation, and interment, but the revelations in the body of the book do more than bring this full circle. “Shame exists even in the shame of feeling ashamed,” writes the author, as she examines how the mixed marriage between her Jewish father and his Catholic bride threatened to generate so much shame that they initially kept it a secret. Rather than developing tolerance, they transferred that stigma to their daughter; her “father disowned [her] several decades ago for having a relationship with a man of mixed race.” Though her love for her parents, and her mother in particular, seems unconditional in these pages, she says that their relationship “had not been easy or comfortable.” As her parents aged, they moved from their native Brooklyn to the warm haven of Florida, where they adjusted to new ways (and new friends) without giving up their own. Her mother was a widow in her 90s when her health started failing, and though the author “had always thought my mother would slip away gently…[t]hat was not the case.” Instead, her decline coincided with a destructive hurricane, leaving other residences leveled and the region without electricity for two weeks. Yet as her mother’s condition had been labeled “Failure to Thrive,” when she was allowed to go home to hospice care, the subtle struggle between mother and daughter eased as well. By the end of the book, Becker has seen death bring “the beginning of a new relationship with my mother,” one evolving through “minor miracles.” Readers may not believe in these, but the author does, absolutely.
A book written as much or more for the author as for any readership, but those going through similar trials will take much solace from the author’s story.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59709-990-5
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
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