A sincerely told story, though readers may find it difficult to sympathize with the writer’s reactions to life’s sometimes...
In this debut memoir, Legacy discusses her lifelong quest to deal with fear and anxiety.
Part of an Italian-American family of four children in Dallas, Texas, Legacy says she was always unsure of her role in the family. She describes her relationships with her siblings and their childhood talks and games, saying, “My head swirled from Cynthia’s challenge of my intellectual knowledge.” One of her first recollections of social anxiety stemmed from her fear of speaking in her first-grade class. Many of these anecdotes, along with others later in her story, may strike readers as a bit insignificant, particularly since these moments struggle to sustain interest or engage empathy. The author spends considerable time dealing with her uneasy relationship with her dismissive father, who slapped her hands after childhood transgressions. This, as well as embarrassing incidents related to her menstruation at the age of 11, convinced Legacy that “this having periods and being a woman stuff is hard.” Considering her parents’ divorce and her peripatetic upbringing, she says, “it was difficult to have pleasure in my life.” Eventually, Legacy began seeing a therapist. After her father’s death, she regretted never having had a comfortable relationship with him, but since she had always relied on her mother for warmth, the older woman’s death is the memoir’s most emotionally compellingly story. Legacy married happily and, after a few false starts, began graduate work and a satisfying career in clinical social work. Menopause set Legacy on a nearly frantic search for hormones and diets to halt her symptoms and the visible changes of aging, including “high-priced cosmetics that didn’t work.” Her search for tranquility seemed to end after she and her husband adopted Nada, a Chihuahua-dachshund mix—“Oh, my God, this is fun!” she says of the “effortless and joyful” delight the dog brings her. A photograph of Nada in Legacy’s arms concludes the book.
A sincerely told story, though readers may find it difficult to sympathize with the writer’s reactions to life’s sometimes less-than-ideal circumstances.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482092950
Page Count: 288
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2015
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
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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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