Women’s book groups take note: For a lively discussion, compare with Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005).
Emotional memoir of a young life turned upside down by sudden death and then slowly put back right.
Taylor constructs her memoir from entries in a journal she kept after her young husband, Josh, died in a skateboarding accident. The author was 24 years old and five months pregnant when it happened, and she unsparingly recorded her deep despair and anger at her loss. Although surrounded by a large, close family and many supportive friends, she was devastated by her new status as a young widow and overwhelmed by the challenges of being a single mother. Taylor briefly recounts her sessions with a grief counselor and details her meetings with a single-mothers group and with a bereavement group of mostly seniors. Although she learned and benefited from these groups, the care of her son, Kai, was what truly restored her. At Kai’s first smile, she writes, “motherhood body slammed wifehood and deemed herself to be bigger, stronger, and downright more important.” Especially rewarding are the author’s descriptions of her 11th-grade English class, where she offers wry comments about her students and pithy summaries of novels she is teaching. She also ponders her relationship with certain literary characters, including Gatsby, who longs to re-create the past; Gregor Samsa, who undergoes a dramatic metamorphosis; and Of Mice and Men’s Lennie and George, who are powerless to change their lives. Taylor does change her life, and the closing pages find her testing herself by finishing a triathlon. Despite the heartbreak, this candid memoir of a journey into and out of darkness has a full quota of humor and ends on a note of hope.
Women’s book groups take note: For a lively discussion, compare with Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005).Pub Date: March 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-71749-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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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