Published in Canada in slightly different form in 1994, this absorbing story of a resourceful and courageous woman learning to live with breast cancer received the Canadian Authors Association Literary Award. A paramedic trained to take control in critical situations, an ocean kayaker accustomed to pushing herself to the limits, and a poet with a gift for self-expression, MacPhee seems better equipped than most women both to face her frightening ordeal and to share the experience with others. What happened to her is unfortunately all too common today, but her account of it is uncommonly good. In 1991 she discovered a lump in her right breast; a biopsy showed the lump to be malignant. A few months later, while still recovering from a mastectomy, she discovered a lump in her left breast, and a lumpectomy was performed. MacPhee writes honestly and powerfully about the impact of cancer on herself, her family—she and her husband have two teenage daughters—and her community of women friends. Friends play an important role in MacPhee's life, and the withdrawal of one of her closest ones during this time is especially difficult for her to accept. Her attitude toward her prosthesis, her ``boob,'' as she derisively calls it, and her eventual discarding of it reveal much about the importance of self-image and the difficulties of coming to terms with a drastically altered body. Indeed, the present work's title expresses the kinship MacPhee feels with one of Picasso's Cubist paintings of a woman with rearranged body parts. An afterword by Kathy LaTour, a breast cancer activist and survivor, reveals that MacPhee has had a recurrence of cancer and is working on a follow-up book, tentatively titled ``Any Day Above Ground Is a Good One.'' Any book from MacPhee promises equally to be a good one.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-56836-138-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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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