by Nyna Giles & Eve Claxton ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 27, 2018
A poignantly compelling memoir about family, mental health, and revisiting the past.
A public relations executive tells the story of her once-glamorous mother’s decline into mental illness.
Giles knew her mother, Carolyn Scott, as a free-spirited but socially isolated Long Island homemaker who was close to Grace Kelly. She also knew her as the woman who insisted to doctors that her youngest daughter was too sickly to attend school. Many years later, when the author saw a newspaper story about how her now homeless and mentally ill mother had been a bridesmaid at Kelly’s wedding, she realized that Carolyn’s early life was a mystery to her. Desperate for insight, Giles began to research her mother's past. Carolyn left her “hardscrabble hometown” in Ohio for New York City when she was 19. She took up residence at the famous Barbizon Hotel for women, where she met and befriended aspiring actress Kelly in 1947. Carolyn started modeling, eventually signing on with the then-fledgling Ford Modeling Agency. Though she married in 1949, she continued to model while Grace began a brief but spectacularly successful career as a film actress, which ended with her marriage to Prince Rainier of Monaco. As she drew nearer to 30, Carolyn devoted herself to motherhood full-time. But after the traumatic C-section birth of her third and final child, she gradually withdrew into the distant, fragile figure of Giles’ memories. Only after consulting with doctors about the circumstances around that birth was the author able to ascertain the truth: though diagnosed with schizophrenia, Carolyn had in fact suffered from postpartum psychosis that had deteriorated over time. Giles suggests that because the condition was not well understood at that time, Carolyn would not have received proper care. But had treatment existed, recovery—and a normal life for her and family—would have been possible. Illustrated throughout with photos, the narrative celebrates a lifelong female friendship while shedding light on a powerful, if at times painful and complex, mother-daughter bond.
A poignantly compelling memoir about family, mental health, and revisiting the past.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-11549-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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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