A poignantly searing fusion of heartbreak and hope.
Candid, compassionate memoir of dealing simultaneously with a newborn and a mother with Alzheimer’s.
It was after the birth of her first child that Lockhart, a neurobiologist turned freelance writer, first became aware that her mother Ruthie, a retired schoolteacher, was becoming uncharacteristically forgetful and semi-incoherent, unable to recall recent telephone conversations or a sizable loan. Ruthie had always been “the capable one, the practical one, the doer,” the author recalls. When her mother’s condition developed into something more serious than just the “late midlife slump” she’d surmised, Lockhart decided to return home to California after years of living in Massachusetts. The belief that being physically closer would somehow rejuvenate Ruthie’s health was soon dashed. She continued to psychologically and physically falter, and was eventually diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s disease just as Lockhart gave birth to her second child. As her mother’s disease progressed, the author explored various costly nursing homes, but couldn’t bring herself to decide. Lockhart’s training as a neurobiologist saturates her narrative; she adroitly explains in scientific yet accessible terminology both the development of new neurons taking place in her newborn’s body and the “sticky plaques” clogging the once-elastic receptor cells in her mother’s brain. Wry humor occasionally seeps into her portrait of such tribulations as fruitlessly attempting to find a place at work to use a breast pump or Ruthie’s random bouts of uncontrollably impulsive behavior. Originally serialized in the online magazine Literary Mama, the memoir juxtaposes the joy and elation of raising a baby with the sad, painful task of caring for a dying parent.
A poignantly searing fusion of heartbreak and hope.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4155-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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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