A powerful story of determination and strong faith that brought a child out of the wreckage of war.
A memoir from one of the Lost Girls of Sudan.
Deng was born in South Sudan, and the first few years of her life were relatively peaceful. She enjoyed her grandmother’s cooking, the ghee she made from the cows they owned, and the lush vegetation that grew around her village. When she was 6, the civil war that had been raging in other parts of the country arrived at her doorstep, and Deng became a refugee of the Bor Massacre of 1991. Her village was destroyed, and she fled on foot with other family members to safety. She spent the next few years living in refugee camps, eating tasteless maize paste donated by the U.N. It was difficult to find joy under these circumstances, but Deng’s strong Christian faith and community of churchgoers she prayed with helped her through her struggles. She also was able to attend school in the refugee camp, an act that ultimately led her on a path to the United States, where she was adopted in 2000 by a family living in Michigan. In this chronicle of her early childhood and subsequent years as an immigrant in the U.S., Deng shares, in mostly straightforward prose, the significant moments that changed her life. Not only did she suffer deprivation and hardship as a young child in the refugee camps; she also faced prejudice as an immigrant, struggling to maintain her Dinka heritage while assimilating to her new culture. Her difficult journey to adulthood and calling as an advocate for other victims of war makes for difficult, sometimes violent reading, but her story is important. In particular, Deng exposes the devastation of war on the innocent, especially women and children, who often bear the brunt of the brutality.
A powerful story of determination and strong faith that brought a child out of the wreckage of war.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5460-1722-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: FaithWords
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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