A brave, heart-rending narrative from the parents who lost their son far too soon.
The parents of Trayvon Martin (1995-2012) tell their sides of the story about his death.
In alternating points of view, Fulton and Martin narrate the events leading up to their son’s death, the trial, and the aftermath. The book is filled with the heartache and anguish only parents who have lost a child can fully understand, as the authors delve into the nitty-gritty details of what it was like to learn of their son’s death, the terrible, nightmarish quality of the days and weeks following the shooting, and the experience of going to trial only to have the killer proclaimed not guilty. They share family stories and anecdotes about Trayvon, giving readers a rounded, more complete picture of the teenager who was gunned down by a neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, on a rainy night in 2012. Their son’s death provoked anger across the country and contributed to the founding of the Black Lives Matter movement, but as Fulton points out, the violence and deaths of African-Americans has hardly stopped after Trayvon. “We tell this story in the hope that it will continue the calling that Trayvon left for us to answer and that it might shine a path for others who have lost, or will lose, children to senseless violence. We tell it in the hope for healing, for bridging the divide that separates America, between races and classes, between citizens and the police,” writes the author. “Most of all, we tell it for Trayvon, whose young soul and lively spirit guide us every day in everything we do.” Fulton and Martin are not heavy-handed on the dramatics; they speak honestly and boldly and win empathy and understanding through their expression of their bleak reality. The authors also provide answers not readily found in the avalanche of news covering this story, and the book should foster further discussions on the issues of race and violence in America.
A brave, heart-rending narrative from the parents who lost their son far too soon.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9723-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2017
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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