Part memoir, part manual, this is the story of a middle-age white couple who adopted a black toddler born addicted to a pharmacy of recreational drugs. ``I never wanted to be a father,'' writes journalist Schwarz (Walking with the Damned, 1992, etc.), blaming an unhappy childhood. But his second wife, Leslie, wanted to be a mother. First she suffered a miscarriage and then a brain tumor. Although she recovered completely, prospects for pregnancy were dim. Watching a television show that paraded the faces of ``unadoptable'' children (too old, the wrong color or ethnic group, too damaged at birth) like so many ``stray cats and dogs from the local humane society,'' they decided to be the ``somebody somewhere'' who would become mother and father to one of these children. They are offered Raheem, a three-year-old boy who had been shuffled from foster home to foster home; in the first 48 hours he spends with his parents-to-be, he throws two temper tantrums and generally leaves ``havoc in his wake.'' To Schwarz's wonderment, he loves the boy deeply and immediately. The adoption is finalized and soon Clifford, a troubled teenager and Raheem's former babysitter, comes to live with them as well. Schwarz's sweet story of how his love for Raheem has changed him is interspersed with the results of his extensive research, including information on the unexpected difficulties of adoption, from dire warnings of Adopted Child Syndrome (the superstitious prejudice that adopted children are ``demon seed,'' destined to rise violently against their adoptive parents) to how ill- prepared parents are to deal with the everyday behavior of children who have been sexually molested or otherwise abused. Useful information combined with an honest and warmhearted account of a couple becoming a family, best suited for others considering adoption of troubled children. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-88282-136-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: New Horizon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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