An illuminating and intense reading experience.
A Honduran Ecuadorian journalist and mental health advocate explores substance abuse in her family and its relationship to immigrant and racial trauma.
Born in San Antonio in 1982, Hoppe was the first-generation American child her parents believed would have everything they did not. Coming into the marriage, her parents achieved their own personal firsts like mothering without abandonment and fathering without violence. What they didn’t realize was that the American dream they chased across the country would demand “the sacrifice of our physical and mental health.” It would also cause the author to fall victim to the alcoholism that destroyed her maternal grandfather. College, the great American gateway to a shining future, brought with it stresses for Hoppe, as well, including a heavy work and class schedule and expectations of moving directly into a well-paying job. It also became the place where, overwhelmed by responsibility, she learned to see alcohol as the cure-all “solution” to hardship and the systemic injustices she faced as a brown-skinned woman. As her drinking worsened, Hoppe began forgetting incidents involving extreme, often dangerous levels of intoxication. She eventually found her way to therapy and Alcoholics Anonymous, only to discover that AA had no room for stories that involved the social inequities Hoppe knew had fueled her alcoholism. “Race-related trauma was labeled terminal uniqueness,” she writes, “and dismissed as a false projection of my self-centered ego.” As the author fought her way back to sobriety, she uncovered healing truths about relatives who had suffered from addiction and about the real yet unacknowledged founders of the modern recovery movement, Native Americans. As this raw, at times unsparing memoir probes the meaning of the American dream for immigrants, it also reveals the sickness inherent in all white supremacist projects, including those meant to heal.
An illuminating and intense reading experience.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9781250865229
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.
One of the best pitchers of his generation—and often the only Black man on his team—shares an extraordinary life in baseball.
A high school star in several sports, Sabathia was being furiously recruited by both colleges and professional teams when the death of his grandmother, whose Social Security checks supported the family, meant that he couldn't go to college even with a full scholarship. He recounts how he learned he had been drafted by the Cleveland Indians in the first round over the PA system at his high school. In 2001, after three seasons in the minor leagues, Sabathia became the youngest player in MLB (age 20). His career took off from there, and in 2008, he signed with the New York Yankees for seven years and $161 million, at the time the largest contract ever for a pitcher. With the help of Vanity Fair contributor Smith, Sabathia tells the entertaining story of his 19 seasons on and off the field. The first 14 ran in tandem with a poorly hidden alcohol problem and a propensity for destructive bar brawls. His high school sweetheart, Amber, who became his wife and the mother of his children, did her best to help him manage his repressed fury and grief about the deaths of two beloved cousins and his father, but Sabathia pursued drinking with the same "till the end" mentality as everything else. Finally, a series of disasters led to a month of rehab in 2015. Leading a sober life was necessary, but it did not tame Sabathia's trademark feistiness. He continued to fiercely rile his opponents and foment the fighting spirit in his teammates until debilitating injuries to his knees and pitching arm led to his retirement in 2019. This book represents an excellent launching point for Jay-Z’s new imprint, Roc Lit 101.
Everything about Sabathia is larger than life, yet he tells his story with honesty and humility.Pub Date: July 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-13375-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Roc Lit 101
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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