by Allison Pataki ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2018
A flawed but heartfelt account of dedication and devotion.
A bestselling historical novelist’s account of how she survived the harrowing year following her young husband’s unexpected stroke.
Pataki (Sisi, Empress on Her Own, 2016, etc.) and her husband, David Levy, were a charmed pair. Intelligent and privileged, both attended Yale University, where they first met as freshmen in 2003. David initially struck the author as a “self-involved, beer-swilling jock.” Over time, however, it became clear that he was not only athletic, but also brilliant and everything that Pataki could ever hope for in a man. Their fairy-tale courtship survived college and a transition to New York, where the author focused on building a career in journalism and David, on building one in medicine. The pair married eight years after they met in a ceremony that, like so much of their relationship, “went off without a hitch.” They moved to Chicago, where Pataki made an extremely successful transition into fiction writing while her husband began the grueling years of his residency at Rush University. In 2015, just as a now-pregnant Pataki was beginning her third book, David suffered a devastating stroke. The result of medically negligible imperfections in David’s anatomy and “a handful of unique situational circumstances,” the event was unthinkable for someone who was just 30. It was “so improbable that there was not even medical literature available” for doctors to consult. Miraculously, the youthful plasticity of David’s brain helped him recover within a year’s time to lead a normal yet permanently altered life. Supportive friends and family helped Pataki endure the aftermath of her husband’s illness, which she dealt with by writing “Dear Dave” letters—some of which she interweaves into the narrative—that chronicled their struggles. The strength of this end-of-innocence book lies in its demystification of the idea that strokes only occur in older people. At the same time, however, the story’s emotional intimacy often verges on overdone sentimentality.
A flawed but heartfelt account of dedication and devotion.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-59165-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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