by Sara Tucker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 22, 2011
A well-written story set against colorful backgrounds.
This debut memoir recounts freelance-writer Tucker’s journey from New York to Africa and back to the United States.
After ending her almost 18-year marriage, the author joined Patrick, her French husband-to-be, in Arusha, Tanzania. She envisioned “a place ... where life could be different, slower, more measured.” Patrick accepted a new job on a trial basis as a national park director in Togo, but, until she could join him, Tucker remained in Arusha to care for her stepson, Thomas, and to deal with the house girl, the guard and the gardener. In Togo, Patrick ends up managing not only the park, but the hotel in which the family has a free suite. Despite the boredom of life in Togo, the three plan to settle there after a brief return to Arusha so they can pack and sell their belongings. In Arusha, though, they learn that the job in Togo will only be part-time, and that in their absence their house has been burglarized and the watchman injured. The couple decides to live in America; they move first to an affluent New Jersey suburb and then to Tucker’s hometown in Vermont. Throughout the book, the contradictions of life in Africa are evident: There are mud huts and whizzing traffic, petty dishonesty and kindness. A retired police officer refuses payment for his help after the burglary, saying, “When somebody has misfortune, it is good to help.” Tucker is a polished writer who neatly folds background information into the narrative. Commenting on the geography of Togo, for example, she says, “His excellency ... looked awfully thin for a high-level bureaucrat, but then, Togo itself was awfully thin.” There are four chapters devoted to Patrick’s African adventures before the couple met, some of which are intriguing; animal lovers will appreciate his experience nurturing a leopard cub. An unexpected conclusion offers a surprising coda to Tucker’s account.
A well-written story set against colorful backgrounds.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456585440
Page Count: 300
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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 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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