This poignant account will resonate with readers who have loved someone who adores the sea.
A wife follows her husband to sea and finds herself along the way in this memoir.
When Cole met John in 1969, they were both married to other people, and he had two children. A few years later, they had left their spouses and were living on a ferryboat on the Long Island Sound. On paper, they couldn’t have been more different. John learned to sail at the age of 4 and spent a few years of his childhood in Africa, whereas the author grew up in Ohio. Yet after one year of aquatic life, they got married. After 15 years on the water, they bought a house in Connecticut. But for John, homeownership and the birth of their daughter, Kate, could not dampen the call of the sea. When Kate was in second grade, Cole and John removed her from school and they set off on an oceangoing sailboat called the Laughing Goat. For three years, the family sailed between Florida and Caribbean locations. The author and John worked remotely and flew to the United States for meetings, but the family’s daily life was mostly on the water. At times, there were not enough children to keep Kate company. For her sake, the family returned to Florida when she was in fifth grade. Once Kate was in college, Cole and John bought a catamaran and sailed between Florida and the Bahamas. The couple’s seafaring adventures ended when John had a heart attack, which led to the discovery of tumors on his lungs and brain. After treatment held John’s cancer in abeyance, the couple sold the catamaran and moved to Mexico. But their reprieve was short-lived, and he died, ending the author and John’s 44-year relationship. A perfect, realistic counterpart to Amity Gaige’s Sea Wife (2020), Cole’s moving memoir is emotionally astute, and her use of excerpts from the Laughing Goat’s log provides welcome insights into John’s perspective. Vivid characterizations of the people and places the family encountered are occasionally bogged down with too many adjectives; Key West men don’t need to be described as “lean,” “tanned,” “gray-haired,” and “pony-tailed.” But the author’s voice is so assured that the occasional saggy sentence is easily overlooked.
This poignant account will resonate with readers who have loved someone who adores the sea.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63363-537-1
Page Count: 246
Publisher: White Bird Communications
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.
An author’s trip to Venice takes a distinctly Borgesian turn.
In November 2020, soccer club Venizia F.C. offered Nigerian American author Madu a writing residency as part of its plan “to turn the team into a global entity of fashion, culture, and sports.” Flying to Venice for the fellowship, he felt guilty about leaving his immigrant parents, who were shocked to learn upon moving to the U.S. years earlier that their Nigerian teaching certifications were invalid, forcing his father to work as a stocking clerk at Rite Aid to support the family. Madu’s experiences in Venice are incidental to what is primarily a story about his family, especially his strained relationship with his father, who was disappointed with many of his son’s choices. Unfortunately, the author’s seeming disinterest in Venice renders much of the narrative colorless. He says the trip across the Ponte della Libertà bridge was “magical,” but nothing he describes—the “endless water on both sides,” the nearby seagulls—is particularly remarkable. Little in the text conveys a sense of place or the unique character of his surroundings. Madu is at his best when he focuses on family dynamics and his observations that, in the largely deserted city, “I was one of the few Black people around.” He cites Borges, giving special note to the author’s “The House of Asterion,” in which the minotaur “explains his situation as a creature and as a creature within the labyrinth” of multiple mirrors. This notion leads to the Borgesian turn in the book’s second half, when, in an extended sequence, Madu imagines himself transformed into a minotaur, with “the head of a bull” and his body “larger, thicker, powerful but also cumbersome.” It’s an engaging passage, although stylistically out of keeping with much of what has come before.
An intriguing but uneven family memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781953368669
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Belt Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2023
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
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