by Otgo Waller ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2017
Waller’s gentle voice weaves an evocative tale of survival and grit.
In her striking debut memoir, Waller trades bad memories of the past for a newfound clarity and strength.
The youngest of six children, Waller was born in Mongolia, not far from the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. Living in a ger (a traditional tent) under the iron fist of communism was challenging in the 1970s and ’80s. On good days, her impoverished family ate whatever they could get, and it was sometimes strange fare, like cow’s head. On bad days, they ate nothing. As a girl, Waller was awestruck when, on a friend’s TV, she saw a famous contortionist named Norovsambuu who twisted her body as if she were “more snake than woman.” Trying to imitate her newfound hero, she began twisting and stretching her own small body. When her older sister took her to audition at the state circus, Waller was accepted for training. She also earned the opportunity to learn the art of contortion from Norovsambuu. Performing her first show at 9-years-old, Waller eventually became the family breadwinner. An unflinching account of the dark side of life for a child performer—when she developed breasts, she was molested by a clown in her troupe—this poignant memoir is heart-rending and not easily forgotten. It’s also suspenseful: Waller’s troupe was trapped in the middle of civil war. After moving to America to work for Ringling Brothers, her broken life began to mend when she met her love. Waller writes powerfully and poetically, using a staccato rhythm, for example, to evoke the terror of being mollested: “This was a man of thinning gray hair that jutted from either side of a round head. This was a man with a face decorated with red paint on the tip of his nose and both cheeks. This was Sanaa the Clown.” Moving quickly, the fluid story can be read in an afternoon, but memorable details—her mother had a green glass eye and a brown eye—leave lasting impressions.
Waller’s gentle voice weaves an evocative tale of survival and grit.Pub Date: April 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5043-7863-5
Page Count: 196
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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