A heartfelt and moving tale, coupling insights into two remarkably different cultures with a love story that, as much as any...
A writer goes to the far side of the world for work and finds a home.
In May 2004, Slater parlayed a position teaching writing to graduate students in Boston into a job teaching English as a second language in Kobe, Japan. She began working as a member of the faculty of the East Asia Executive MBA Program, and any hard-earned confidence she had gained working in Boston quickly vanished. Shortly into the program, Slater was asked to talk to students more quietly and be more demure, “like women here are supposed to.” Despite this—or perhaps because of it—the author found a kindred spirit, of sorts, in a student named Toru. They fell quickly and deeply in love, a storybook-romance sort of love, in which they realized immediately that they were meant to meet and be together, despite the odds of it happening. The relationship grew, carried forward by their learning to communicate with each other. Then they were split apart when Toru left to be with his mother, who was critically injured by a hit-and-run driver and died a short time later. The book truly finds its legs when the couple reunites in America, as Slater chronicles how she began to acclimate to Toru’s country. Her eyes opened to the many the things she’d become inured to in America and the beauty of simple differences in Japan. With her mother cautioning her against it, her own roots in Massachusetts, and her heart pulling her across the globe, Slater had to decide whether—and how—to try and make it work. The author certainly makes the telling of it work.
A heartfelt and moving tale, coupling insights into two remarkably different cultures with a love story that, as much as any true love story can, delivers a happy ending.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-16620-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
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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