Wrenching yet eloquent and fiercely hopeful.
A blogger and keynote speaker’s debut memoir about losing her young husband to cancer and the struggle to rebuild her life.
Sharp’s marriage to her beloved first husband, Brett, seemed all but inevitable. Both “had grown up in neighboring towns with both parents still together and mutual friends of all ages.” But when Brett was diagnosed with brain cancer just three years later, the pair faced the defining challenge of their marriage. He survived chemotherapy and went into remission, but radiation caused permanent baldness, a case of severe neuropathy and other health issues. Both decided to start a family despite the pall of uncertainty that the cancer had spread over their lives, and in vitro fertilization allowed Sharp to become pregnant with twins. However, within days of giving birth, they learned that Brett’s cancer had returned. For two and a half years, Sharp was brutally squeezed between managing new motherhood and caring for a rapidly declining spouse. Eventually, Brett succumbed to the disease, and healing from a death that had taken place over seven of their 11 years of marriage proved extremely difficult. Sharp had to deal with her own grief as well as that of two small, frightened children, who could not understand that their father was never coming back again. The author moved to Denver, where, after reading an article on eligible bachelors in a local magazine, she sent an email to Steve Saunders, who had lost his own wife to cancer and was himself the father of two teenage sons. Through dating, and eventually marrying, a widower with experiences so like her own, and then learning how to live in a blended family, Sharp came to her most powerful realization: While it would never be possible to completely “balance the scales” after a loss of the kind she suffered, she could still rededicate herself to living life to the fullest.
Wrenching yet eloquent and fiercely hopeful.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9839378-6-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Books & Books Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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