Next book

AMERICAN WIFE

A MEMOIR OF LOVE, WAR, FAITH, AND RENEWAL

A straightforward, honest, and humble memoir.

Kyle relates the story of her life with her husband, Chris Kyle, of American Sniper fame.

With the assistance of DeFelice, who also co-authored American Sniper, Kyle gives readers an inside view of life in their early years of marriage, the moments of tenderness and romance that drew them together, the births of their two children, and the sadness, disappointment, and anger she felt when Kyle was deployed repeatedly to various locations in the Middle East. She discusses some of the missions her husband carried out in dangerous places like Ramadi, Fallujah, and Baghdad and how Chris did his job without question, seeing it as a duty to protect those he had sworn to serve. Kyle delves into the difficulties they both experienced when her husband decided not to re-enlist, the emotional ups and downs and physical toll his job had taken on him, and her own need to have him be whole. The author also addresses the process of writing American Sniper and the overnight fame it brought, as well as the Jesse Ventura lawsuit, Chris’ murder, and the overwhelming grief she experienced after her husband’s death. Kyle includes actual emails Chris sent while on deployment that address the terrible pressures she felt being a military wife in charge of two small children while fearing for her husband’s life. The story is gritty, romantic, and bittersweet, as only a story of this nature can be. It may not have a happy ending, but it is filled with a love, a strong faith in God, family, and country, and the determination of a woman to carry on as best she can under the strain of fame and the burden of grief. Those familiar with American Sniper will appreciate this perspective on Kyle’s life.

A straightforward, honest, and humble memoir.

Pub Date: May 4, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-06-239808-6

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 22


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist


  • National Book Award Winner

Next book

BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 22


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


  • Kirkus Reviews'
    Best Books Of 2015


  • Kirkus Prize
  • Kirkus Prize
    winner


  • New York Times Bestseller


  • IndieBound Bestseller


  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist


  • National Book Award Winner

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

Close Quickview