by Shirley Goek-Lin Lim ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 1996
An English professor (Univ. of Calif., Santa Barbara) and a poet, Lim recounts her childhood in Malaysia and her later life in America, where she struggles to find the meaning of home and community. Lim's mother abandoned her six children when Lim was eight years old. She could not stand her husband's quick temper and their poverty. Although he raged and beat the children, Lim idolized her fun-loving, musical father, until his marriage to their former maid's teenage daughter alienated her from his affection. At the same time, prejudice against Malaysians of Chinese descent (like her father) was rising. As the only girl in a family of boys, Lim learned early that gender also set her apart from others, yet she spent much of her childhood trying to be like her wild brothers. At Catholic school, the nuns sought to shackle her rambunctious, questioning spirit. Lim, although a lover of English, was frustrated by a system that seemed only to require the memorization of facts and ignored Malaysian literature and culture. University life proved equally frustrating. Anti-Chinese riots in 1969 coupled with two stifling romances led Lim to leave for Brandeis University. The New England cold unnerved her and loneliness unmoored her, but she earned her Ph.D., married an American, moved to New York City with her husband, and began teaching at a community college in the South Bronx. Active on minority feminist concerns and a frequent visitor to Malaysia, Lim has realized that the act of writing brings her the homeland she has been searching for. Unfortunately, Lim's tale is unbalanced. The Malaysian section is stunning: evocative writing bolstered by insights into colonialism, race relations, and the concept of the ``other.'' But her account of life in America, by contrast, seems hurried and leaves some puzzling gaps in her personal life. Still, this is an entrancing memoir. (10 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1996
ISBN: 1-55861-144-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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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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