While not all facets are of equal interest, this account of war, immigration, and family remains heartfelt and readable...
A debut memoir chronicles a woman’s Christianity-fueled life in the Philippines and the United States.
Barinaga grew up in an agricultural town in the Philippines called Burauen. Her father was a devoted Protestant in a predominantly Roman Catholic country, and she always admired his “boldness in telling people about Jesus.” The author was only 3 years old in 1941 when the Japanese invaded the nation. She and her family moved to a small community near Burauen, where they lived a tense existence under enemy occupation. After the war, she attended a Christian high school then earned a degree in nursing from Silliman University. She married in 1960, and, after some difficult pregnancies, she moved with her family to the United States. In America, she and her husband, Leon, operated a home health care business. Leon eventually developed liver cancer. His struggle with the disease is detailed along with his edict that he would “ask God to lead and direct us” throughout the ordeal. God and Christianity are frequent presences throughout the book, as in an excerpt from the author’s journal, where she notes: “My prayer today is that God will grant me peace and strength.” The memoir moves briskly from event to event. Whether it is the struggle of operating a business or losing a loved one, the book never lingers too long on one subject. While such a pace keeps things moving, certain portions could have benefited from more reflection. For instance, the Japanese occupation of the Philippines is a striking event. The circumstances for people like Barinaga, who had to participate in an hour of exercise each morning while being watched by the enemy, makes for touching personal material. But some questions are left unanswered. Did she, as a child, understand what was going on? What did her family feel at the time? Other incidents, such as the wedding of a granddaughter, do not make for quite as stimulating reading. Information like “The exchange of vows was just a breeze yet solemn” pales in comparison to, say, occurrences during wartime. Nevertheless, the memoir never falters in delivering nuanced, digestible stories from the author’s life.
While not all facets are of equal interest, this account of war, immigration, and family remains heartfelt and readable throughout.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5144-3208-2
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2019
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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