Not another slick how-to, but a comforting reminder that life goes on after the spouse is gone.
A divorced mother’s funny, chatty, revealing take on Splitsville—with just enough anguish and sadness to be utterly believable.
Nestor (Writing/Univ. of Washington) divides her memoir into the same three phases that mark the stages of coping with divorce. Shock and Denial are the subjects of Part One, the book’s longest. Here the author covers her family history (mother and grandmother were both divorced), her skepticism about marriage, her romance with and ultimate marriage to a younger man. Twelve years and two daughters later she discovered that he had secretly gambled away large sums of money, and the marriage ended abruptly. An unexpected treat here is a vivid portrait of the author’s thrice-married, utterly nonmaternal but generous mother. Forced to cope with the economic and social realities of single motherhood in Part Two, Adjustment, Nestor turned to an array of self-help books for divorcees, some of which get brief but helpful critiques here. An upcoming high-school reunion reconnected her with an old boyfriend and offered the possibility of falling in love again. In Part Three, Acceptance, we see the long-distance affair with the old boyfriend petering out. He made her feel loved at a time when she felt unlovable, but eventually she began to achieve some measure of contentment and stability on her own. Rats in the basement of her dilapidated old farmhouse prompted her to relocate to a snug new townhouse, a move that signaled the launching of a new life for her and for what she now thinks of as her “girlfamily.” Women going through the pain and turmoil of separation and divorce will appreciate Nestor’s candor and wit.
Not another slick how-to, but a comforting reminder that life goes on after the spouse is gone.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-34676-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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