The heartwarming story of a writer’s discovery that the aging process—and life in general—can be tragic and wondrous, all at...
A touching debut memoir about a middle-aged woman charged with caring for both her aging father and her two growing children.
Sullivan’s story begins at a time when she was in a particularly tough spot: her mother had died, her father had suffered a stroke, and her husband had filed for divorce. Rather than wallow in grief or self-pity, the author decided to do something that just felt good, so she moved from Indiana to sunny Anna Maria Island, Florida, where her parents had owned a beach cottage for decades. The idea seemed like an idyllic escape and a flawless plan—except for the fact that her father, who needed constant care, wanted to go with her, and her Indiana-based siblings wouldn’t hear of it. But Sullivan decided to go anyway, packing up her kids and her dad and heading to the Gulf of Mexico. The memoir tracks her subsequent adventures in Florida, where she lived through hurricanes, floods, and plenty of long-distance spats with siblings. It also chronicles the slow decline of her father, who later suffered from dementia and cancer. Overall, Sullivan’s book is a tender tribute to a man she regarded as a kind father and beloved grandparent. It also provides a moving picture of the ways that the family made their ailing patriarch’s final years adventurous and fun, such as by taking a family vacation to Ireland. The author deftly examines the drama of complicated family dynamics and provides an accurate picture of what it’s like to be a member of the so-called “sandwich generation,” caring for both children and parents. One of the strongest aspects of Sullivan’s memoir is the way she beautifully describes caring for a parent with dementia: “His senility was like water rushing through my fingers; I couldn’t grab hold of it, understand it, manage it at all….[T]he dementia came and went without an itinerary. We just had to follow along and do the best we could.”
The heartwarming story of a writer’s discovery that the aging process—and life in general—can be tragic and wondrous, all at once.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-940442-12-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Walrus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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