A heartfelt, emotionally stirring book about the resilience of the human spirit.
A woman’s faith inspires her to help start a support group for grieving families of 9/11 victims in this debut memoir.
After experiencing the sudden losses of her father and sister in 1976 and 1978, Koch was overwhelmed by sorrow and heartache. She went on to endure intense health challenges of her own, including a cancer diagnosis and multiple surgeries. But through it all, her family’s support was unwavering. It quickly becomes clear to readers that Koch also drew strength from another source: her faith in God. During good times and bad, her religion helped her find the will to go on, which is part of the reason why, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, she felt a powerful calling to help the victims’ surviving family members: “I had great confidence that the Spirit would guide me to walk alongside the families of 9/11.” Koch helped to organize the Saint James 9/11 Bereavement Support Group, in Basking Ridge, New Jersey, which quickly filled to capacity, and she drew on years of experience as a grief counselor to guide families through their darkest moments. Koch leaves out few details as she walks readers through her organizational strategies for the group, and the book’s diarylike format provides readers with a sense of progression through the healing process. There are also multiple references to Koch’s faith, including numerous biblical quotations. The author offers detailed and engaging insights into the psychology of mourning, as well. However, the real proof of the group’s transformative power comes at the end, in the form of personal testimonies by the members themselves. This is the most poignant section of the book, and certainly the most captivating, as people from all walks of life write candidly about their experiences of 9/11, and explain how Koch’s support group improved their lives during its two years of operation.
A heartfelt, emotionally stirring book about the resilience of the human spirit.Pub Date: April 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-6976-9
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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