by Pati Adams ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2015
An impressively candid confessional about a woman’s spiritual struggles that lacks in-depth reflection.
An unflinching, life-spanning memoir of transformation after rocky beginnings.
In her nonfiction debut, Adams presents an ambitious review of her entire life. Starting from her 1950s childhood in a seaside Connecticut town, Adams recounts a common fantasy: “I had many hopes and dreams of becoming someone beautiful and that someday my prince would ride up on his white horse.” The rest of the book concerns the various ways that that youthful dream does and doesn’t come true, with a focus on the author’s shifting understanding of the world’s complexities and the meaning of living well. The initial chapters detail Adams’ early experiments with drugs and delinquency, as well as her tumultuous marriage and struggles with motherhood. Later on, the loosely structured narrative transitions into an account of the author’s midlife commitment to born-again Christianity and its transformative effect on her life. Throughout, Adams confronts her life with candor and painstaking attention to detail. All that detail sometimes feels extraneous—readers will unlikely be interested in the particulars of Adams’s workplace spats or real -estate transactions—but the author’s commitment to honesty is also moving. Readers who have faced similar challenges may find hope in her account of success after struggles. In the book’s final act, Adams describes how she has devoted her professional life to working at anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. While Adams’ uncompromising support of conservative Christian values is likely problematic for those on the opposite side of the politically charged abortion debate, those who share her beliefs may by inspired by her work. Overall, the author’s story reads more like a journal than a memoir; it’s heavy on minutiae and light on substantive analyseis of the events. The writing is also vague and uninventive at times, as when Adams repeatedly describes babies as “bundles of joy” and “smelling of baby powder.” Still, she often succeeds in drawing out the universal challenges within her personal experiences, making her story potentially meaningful to anyone trying to reconcile childhood fantasy with adult realities.
An impressively candid confessional about a woman’s spiritual struggles that lacks in-depth reflection.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4908-8533-9
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
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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