by Nancy Bachrach ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2009
With smart, subtle prose, Bachrach limns a journey toward love that feels fresh, organic and as unpredictable as life itself.
A sophisticated, funny debut about growing up with a manic mother and coming to terms with a fatal family accident.
Bachrach was in Paris launching a hopeless antiperspirant ad campaign when her brother called with the news that their father Mort was dead and that their mother Lola was in a coma. The couple had spent the night on their docked boat, Mr. Fix It, breathing in carbon monoxide from a generator incorrectly repaired by Mort. Lola, who slept near a leaky porthole that provided a stream of oxygen, was still alive but not expected to pull through. Told to prepare herself for a double funeral, Bachrach wondered how she would do that: “Pack two of everything? Pack clothes that are very black?” The author’s humor is acerbic, rich with allusion and beautifully timed. She describes her mother, pre-coma, theatrically imparting the vision that Lola was the center of the universe and everyone else revolved around her: “She is Salome, stripping the veil off the face of the cosmos. She is my mother, Lola Hornstein. And she is crazy.” Bachrach returned to Providence to aid her siblings, a piano-playing surgeon and an art-therapy professor. Mort’s funeral was packed. “My father on his own would have been a so-so draw,” she writes, “but this crowd thought they were coming for a double bill.” Instead, Lola awoke, but as a sedated, babbling version of the brilliant, electrically energetic woman who raised them. Bachrach rooted for her mother to overcome the doctors’ diagnoses of permanent brain damage, but she was carrying around some bitterness from a quirky childhood, and intermittent flashbacks make it easy to see why. Lola’s manic episodes weren’t unique; the family history was rife with mad geniuses.
With smart, subtle prose, Bachrach limns a journey toward love that feels fresh, organic and as unpredictable as life itself.Pub Date: May 4, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-27090-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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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