by Regina McBride ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 2016
A wrenchingly lyrical memoir of family and tragedy.
A novelist and poet tells the fragmented story of how she came to terms with the suicides of her father and then her mother.
The memoir opens with an 18-year-old McBride (The Fire Opal, 2012, etc.) in a psychiatric hospital struggling to cope with the deaths of her parents. Moving back and forth through time, the author examines her past in an attempt to understand it and the parents who shaped it. The daughter of two Irish Catholic parents who “lov[ed] and miss[ed]” an Ireland they had never seen, McBride bore witness to the traumatic disintegration of her family over time. The problems began when her father, Vincent, did not get the well-paying job he and McBride’s mother, Barbara, expected. The family was forced to move out of the big house in Yonkers that her parents had bought in expectation of Vincent’s success. They traveled to Santa Fe along with McBride’s senile, often cruel grandmother Nanny. Meanwhile, Vincent continued to struggle professionally. Unable to advance in his career, he took a second job as a bartender and began to drift into alcoholism while Barbara became increasingly unstable and Nanny more demented and embittered. After Nanny’s death, the situation between McBride’s parents only worsened, with Barbara threatening suicide and becoming more violent toward her husband, who eventually shot himself. Five months later, Barbara shot herself as well and “died without a face.” Haunted both literally and figuratively by her parents’ ghosts, McBride eventually sold everything she owned and moved to Ireland, where she was determined to live and make peace with her parents and her past. Harrowing yet beautiful, the book is not only an exploration of the interplay between memory and imagination. It is also an eloquent meditation on the painful burdens of the past that parents bequeath their children.
A wrenchingly lyrical memoir of family and tragedy.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-941040-43-0
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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