An unflinching, bleak but ultimately hopeful journey through grief.
The sudden death of a beloved husband tests a widow’s faith in this heartfelt memoir.
After 40 years of marriage, seven kids and 54 foster children, the author’s husband George developed an aggressive brain tumor that carried him off just three weeks after diagnosis. George was a pillar of his family and their rural Alberta church, and his swift decline, movingly sketched by Doble, brought tender leave-takings and outpourings of tribute from relatives and friends. Still, his death renders Doble distraught and inconsolable—“I feel like the black hole I fell into is closing over the top of me and I do not even want to try to get out.” The trauma provokes bitterness—she accuses members of her church of failing in their duty to pray with her and of shunning her as a newly single woman, and she feels that her children wish that she had died instead of George—and an anger at God that challenges her evangelical beliefs. Most of all she feels that she has lost herself along with her husband. “If you put your heart and soul into a marriage and it ends, what is left of you?” she says; “Where is your starting place to become you and not someone’s shadow?” Doble’s narrative never mutes either the passion of her love for George or the anguish at his death. There are very dark passages—at one point she contemplates suicide—and scornful rejections of the healing platitudes she hears. (“My sister Dixie says fake it till you make it. I think you fake it till you perfect the faking.”) But the rawness of Doble’s emotion makes her climb back toward faith and a future all the more credible.
An unflinching, bleak but ultimately hopeful journey through grief.Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2010
ISBN: 978-1452087856
Page Count: 114
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
