A memoir that has the courage to believe in eternal love, despite the pain.
A memoir from Barrett detailing the “agony and ecstasy” of love, documented through letters.
As a young, recently separated career woman in 1956, Barrett plans a vacation to Mexico to escape from her day-to-day life on Wall Street. Traveling alone, she is met by her tour guide, Jorge, in Mexico City and taken to the Hotel Del Prado to meet with the rest of the tour group for several excursions. Though Jorge is married with children, the two fall in love—ill-fated love, since divorce is impossible in the Catholic Church. Jorge’s letters and the competent illustrations of his postcards—which the author includes here—have a transporting effect, conveying the beauty of Mexico and Mexican culture but also the experience of being desperately in love while separated by distance and familial and religious obligations. The narrative speedily breezes through the romance and trip, with the writing evoking a vacation diary—stretching out at first with descriptions of a bullfight in Mexico City, a boat ride across Lake Patzcuaro and a night of dancing at the Casanova night club in Cuernevaca, then finishing all too quickly. Despite Jorge’s wife uncovering the affair eventually, Barrett never explores the morality of the situation, saying only, “I never questioned the right or wrong of it.” Less than a fifth of the book is narration, with the bulk made up of the 76 letters the author receives from Jorge over several years following her trip, letters that alternate between endless affirmations of his love and effusive pleadings for reassurance. Repetitive at times—perhaps those three little words can be said too much—Jorge does express some touching sentiments: “All the females that I see have something that reminds me of you...I see only you in everyone.” The book tells a story of endless love that comes but “solamente una vez en la vida,” and leaves the reader wanting more.
A memoir that has the courage to believe in eternal love, despite the pain.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1450279949
Page Count: 207
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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