Extraordinary people with extraordinary experiences—all expressed in leaden prose that drags to earth a story that should...
In language most hackneyed, a mother relates her daughter’s struggle to survive pediatric HIV/AIDS and her emergence as a spokesperson for AIDS awareness.
Is there a cliché in the English language that does not appear here? People go “the extra mile,” “stay on top of everything” (or find things “spinning out of control”); they have “two strikes against them” as they find the way “out of the woods,” only to learn that something is “a double-edged sword” and that there are “no simple answers or quick fixes.” And then this whopper: “Being cooped up together 24/7 for weeks on end was no picnic.” The slothful prose, fashioned by Romanowski (who has ghosted books with Annette Funicello and psychic George Anderson, 1994 and 1991, respectively), diminishes immeasurably the effect of a most inspiring story. In 1984, Patricia Broadbent and her husband adopted Hydeia as an infant and learned in her fourth year that her many medical problems and lack of appetite were due to one thing: the HIV virus she had inherited from her birth mother, a drug addict who had surrendered Hydeia shortly after delivery. This alarming intelligence animated rather than depressed the Broadbents. They made themselves experts on the infection, battled ignorance and fear wherever they found it (from nursery schools to physicians’ offices), and became fierce advocates for their daughter—and for others suffering from the infection, especially children. The National Institutes of Health accepted Hydeia in one of their experimental treatment programs, and the Broadbents began their long, stressful, expensive, but ultimately rewarding journey. Hydeia herself became an articulate AIDS activist, met an assortment of celebrities who contributed energy and/or money to her cause and appeared on countless talk shows—and even on the podium at the GOP National Convention (1996). She contributes a few pages here, as well.
Extraordinary people with extraordinary experiences—all expressed in leaden prose that drags to earth a story that should soar.Pub Date: March 19, 2002
ISBN: 0-679-46314-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
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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