Simply told, more in sorrow than in anger: a personal chronicle of the darker side of faith and family.
A young woman who ran away from her Old Order family to marry the man she loved critiques the customs, beliefs, and childrearing practices of this ultra-strict Amish group.
Raised on a farm in Iowa, Garrett briefly describes the history of the Amish and their way of life before relating how in 1996 she eloped with Ottie Garrrett and moved to Kentucky. The Old Order Amish, who fled religious persecution in Germany in the 18th century, do not own cars or use telephones or electricity. The women must wear long, dark dresses held together by pins (buttons are considered a sign of vanity) and cover their heads at all times. Education ends in the eighth grade; the children then work on the family farms. The religion preaches rigid adherence to the Bible (men are the head of the house, children must obey their parents) and punishes transgressors by shunning or excommunication. The fifth of seven children, 15-year-old Ruth met much older Ottie in 1989, when he came into town for a visit. Her grandfather asked the visitor to chauffeur the local Amish, who did not drive themselves but did take automobile trips to see families and sights. Recently graduated from school and determined not to marry an Amish man—she saw her father’s dictatorial treatment of her mother as typical—the young girl was soon attracted to Ottie. The feeling was mutual, and they married in defiance of her family and the community, which called all outsiders “the English” and regarded them as depraved. Garrett describes her family’s hurtful reactions and her halting adjustment to the outside world: she bought dresses without trying them on because she did not know that stores provided fitting rooms. Excommunicated by the Amish, she found in the local Lutheran church a warm welcome and a loving God.
Simply told, more in sorrow than in anger: a personal chronicle of the darker side of faith and family.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-052992-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 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.
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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