A testament to the restorative power of empathy and the unique gift of understanding that women can bring to each other.
A mother explores her grief and finds strength in a group of women whose children have all been diagnosed with HIV.
In 1987, at the age of 31, Loebl’s son David told her that he was HIV-positive. The author, who immigrated to the United States after World War II, had only just begun to address her fears and accept her son’s homosexuality. Upon the diagnosis, however, she immediately put her questioning aside and devoted herself to David’s care. His exuberant young friends welcomed her as one of the rare supportive parents in their community, and Loebl found independence in her frequent trips from New York to visit David in San Francisco. But caring for an adult son is a delicate ordeal, and Loebl was wary of suffocating him. In a rich exploration of the competing priorities of motherhood, Loebl recalls the need to be strong for David while simultaneously hiding her own depression. Unable to reveal her pain to David or her family, Loebl joined a support group for mothers of children with AIDS, but her relationship to the group was tinged with ambivalence. The sad stories exhausted her, as did the frequent funerals that reminded her how deceptive were David’s verve and healthful good looks. But the author ultimately found comfort in the group, sharing hope and news of treatments. Ten years after the diagnosis, with no cure in sight, she reached out to the group to prepare emotionally for David’s death. With disarmingly direct, unsentimental prose, the author makes her grief palpable, as she quietly observes her son in moments of hysteria, pleading for her late into the night; in episodes of understated resilience as he forges ahead in relationships; in work and in his love of theatre and dance. Through her nuanced analysis of the psychology of others–from her son and husband to the kaleidoscope of women in her support group–the author reveals plenty of herself as well.
A testament to the restorative power of empathy and the unique gift of understanding that women can bring to each other.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-41575-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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