A moving yet muddled personal story.
This debut volume of a mother’s memoir recounts her experience of turning to God for solace in grieving the death of her two-year-old son.
Beginning with her adolescence and moving forward to her son’s untimely death from complications relating to influenza, Taylor writes of her lifelong curiosity about death and the role that God plays in it. After the tragedy in her family, both issues intensified to a point of obsession for the author. At its heart, this story is as compelling, difficult and rewarding as any great personal memoir. Written long after the tragedy of her son’s death, Taylor views the events and circumstances of her life and that time with the practicality necessary to prevent the narrative from slipping into an eyeless, self-indulgent mess. The problem is that Taylor places this sensible approach in a much larger scope. In the introduction, she makes clear that the entirety of the book hinges on God and how He affects our ideas of life and death. This is a fine foundation for this type of memoir, but the author is too hesitant to truly sell the idea, probably because of her difficult experiences with “death in the family” books after her son’s passing. Taylor leaves readers to draw their own conclusions about the relationship between God and mortality, which comes across as alarmingly indecisive for a woman who intends to focus dutifully on that exact relationship. While it’s refreshing to see such a devout woman allow others their opinions, the author could have made her points more forcefully. However, even with this shortcoming, she tells the story of her emotional survival after her son’s death with a confiding gusto that avoids bleak self-pity, becoming palatable and mature.
A moving yet muddled personal story.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4363-2848-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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