A searing visit to a Dickensian world of cruelty and indifference to children.
Debut memoirist Louise eloquently indicts a family and community that abused and neglected her.
Worst of all, the author states in her colloquial first-person narrative, they made her feel unwanted. Regina’s teenaged mother, Ruby, already had another daughter, born when she was 13, so the new baby was handed off to Big Mama, a foster mother in Austin, Texas, who provided the bare necessities for the children in her care. Beaten badly by Big Mama’s daughter, Regina ran away to the woman she believed to be her father’s mother, who was not only abusive but also unwilling to raise her; soon she was back with Big Mama. Louise describes a troubled childhood that included truancy and rape. Initially happy when she was moved from Big Mama to her biological mother, now living in North Carolina with two sons by another man, Regina soon learned that Ruby favored her sons, and she endured sexual and physical abuse from Ruby’s current boyfriend. She moved to California to be with her father, married to a white woman, but he was no better, and 12-year-old Regina landed in a county shelter. There, she met Claire Kennedy, an employee who treated her with kindness, appreciation, and growing affection. Regina wanted to stay in the shelter near Claire, but the authorities insisted she be placed in foster homes, oppressive and uncaring places from which she ran away. Another hurtful blow landed when her parents gave up custody and she became a ward of the state. Regina, whose experiences with black families had not been good, longed to live permanently with Claire, but the state objected to a white woman adopting her. The end of this volume, first in a planned pair, finds the traumatized girl still in limbo.
A searing visit to a Dickensian world of cruelty and indifference to children.Pub Date: June 12, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-52910-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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