Not a foster-care horror story exactly, but a thoughtful recalling of the emotional toll a life of uncertainty can take.
An unsentimental and thus telling memoir by the middle of three sisters who grew up in a series of foster homes in Fresno, California.
Their father was already in prison for a bumbled robbery attempt when their mother went to a movie with a boyfriend and didn’t come back. It was 1970: Paula was only four years old, Teresa was six, Penny three. Herein are Paula’s memories of their years in foster care, moving with her sisters from family to family until their 1974 placement with Bub and Hilde at Lindbergh Acres, a rundown ranch where they lived for almost 11 years. Earlier foster families ranged from the bizarre to the abusive. The Spinozas had a seven-year-old son who ran through the house clad only in a makeshift superhero cape. Mrs. Clapp was addicted to purple, and Mr. Clapp made sexual overtures to Paula and perhaps to her sisters as well; they never talked about it. The Fredricksons bought them bicycles and had family meetings and seemed to actually love them, but sent them away after only a few months. At their last placement, Hilde set rules that no one could fathom, occasionally beat them, and sometimes hid their clothes, but Bub was fun-loving and affectionate, and they were provided with food, clothing, toys, and their own horses. Several chapters are devoted to the sisters’ adolescence, no more or less tumultuous than most, although given an extra edge by Hilde’s increasingly unstable behavior and the ever-present threat of being moved to yet another foster home. Throughout it all, the sisters remained together, an extraordinary achievement in the annals of foster care. They were living together and attending college when their mother finally resurfaced in 1986 to establish a tentative relationship the author admits still baffles her today.
Not a foster-care horror story exactly, but a thoughtful recalling of the emotional toll a life of uncertainty can take.Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-59742-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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.
Atlanticsenior 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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Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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