by Sarah Saffian ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 1998
Saffian’s record is a tribute to both families, who behaved sensitively throughout.
A vividly realized memoir by an adoptee who was eventually "found" by her birth parents.
Journalist and former New York Daily News reporter Saffian shared a comfortable, upper-middle-class life with a loving, supportive family. Though her adoptive mother died when she was only six years old, within a few years her father remarried; her new mother, too, was thoroughly devoted to her. To her parents' credit, she feels as bonded to them as do her siblings, who are their biological offspring. By the time she was 24 and a graduate of Brown University, Saffian had a comfortable apartment, a caring boyfriend, and an engaging job. But when she was contacted by her natural mother, her entire life was thrust off course. Feeling cheated that she was not the one to conduct the search, she wasn't ready to welcome her birth parents into her life. Even though they were loving and open, Saffian couldn't help but view them as intruders; she was determined to get to know them, yet on her own terms. She questioned, for example, how they could claim to love her before they'd even met her as an adult. During the three-year period leading from her birth mother’s initial phone call to Saffian’s meeting with her birth parents, she involved herself in a painful journey of self-discovery. Sharing letters, memories, and insights, the author takes us with her on this sometimes torturous yet ultimately satisfying trip. Also included here is an appendix listing organizations and support groups for those involved with the adoption process, along with a bibliography of books about adoption.
Saffian’s record is a tribute to both families, who behaved sensitively throughout.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-465-03618-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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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