In the end, Jin’s otherness became the unlooked-for gift that taught Antonetta how love was as much about risk as it was...
An award-winning memoirist’s moving account of how adopting a South Korean baby taught her about motherhood and love.
Adoption had been an attractive option to Antonetta (A Mind Apart: Travels in a Neurodiverse World, 2005, etc.) and her husband even before they had begun trying to conceive. “Put together,” she writes, “we had a genetic picture that looked like a Munch painting: bipolar disorder and alcoholism going back many generations.” One painful miscarriage and several years later, the pair decided to adopt internationally and settled on Jin, an Asian boy with “dark hair and large liquid eyes.” Although not born of her body, the baby nevertheless had a profound impact on Antonetta even before she held him in her arms. Maternal hormones surged through her body, and in the months before Jin arrived, her home began to look like a cross between “late Victorian [and] early Fisher-Price.” Memories of her troubled past, which included drug abuse, a difficult relationship with her parents, and recurring battles with mental illness, also began to resurface. With both anxiety and joy, Antonetta plunged into motherhood knowing that it would remake her as a woman, wife and daughter. Though fear of rejection by Jin dogged her, she overcame it and learned to navigate the murky waters of transracial parent-child relationships in the process. As she felt him “grow into [her], ounce by ounce,” Antonetta’s notion of family also evolved. Adoption did not simply occur between adults and children. It could also happen between adults and their parents, as when the author “adopted” her aging mother and father by becoming their caregiver.
In the end, Jin’s otherness became the unlooked-for gift that taught Antonetta how love was as much about risk as it was acceptance.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-06817-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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
