Mark Sakamoto
Auteur de Forgiveness
Œuvres de Mark Sakamoto
Sakamoto, Mark (About) 1 exemplaire
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Sexe
- male
- Nationalité
- Canada
- Pays (pour la carte)
- Canada
- Lieu de naissance
- Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada
- Études
- Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada (LLB)
- Courte biographie
- A lawyer by training, Mark has enjoyed a rich and varied career. He began his professional career in live music, working with several international acts. He has worked at a national law firm, a national broadcaster and has served as a senior political advisor to a national party leader. He is an entrepreneur and investor in digital health and digital media. Mark is the Executive Vice-President for Think Research, an international cloud-based software firm in Toronto. In that capacity he is responsible for driving all aspects of business development. Mark is also the Chair of the Board of the Ontario Media Development Corporation and serves on the Board of the University of Toronto's Trudeau Centre for Peace, Conflict and Justice at the Munk School of Global Affairs.
Sakamoto's book, Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents is a #1 national best seller and has been optioned as a feature film by Don Carmody.
Membres
Critiques
Forgiveness par Mark Sakamoto
The difference between the first half and the second half of the book is striking! - as someone on here has aptly called it: two books under one cover. It seems like they forgot to edit or proofread the second half - some very awkward sentences.
Mark Sakamoto’s grandparents were on two different sides of WWII. His maternal grandfather fought in the war and was captured and spent years as a prisoner of war, first in Hong Kong, then in Japan. Mark’s paternal grandmother, a Japanese-Canadian, and her family lost their home and livelihood in BC and were sent to rural Alberta to farm. Mark and his brother were born and raised in Medicine Hat, Alberta. After Mark’s parents marriage ended, his mother had a really hard time (to put it lightly, but trying not to give too much away in my summary).
The summaries of this book make it sound like it’s all WWII, but it’s not. I found the book to be an entire biography of his grandparents, then his own – with a focus on his relationship with his mom. I really liked this. A little “bonus” for me was that Mark’s wife is from Assiniboia, Sask, a small town about 45 minutes from the town I grew up in.… (plus d'informations)
The summaries of this book make it sound like it’s all WWII, but it’s not. I found the book to be an entire biography of his grandparents, then his own – with a focus on his relationship with his mom. I really liked this. A little “bonus” for me was that Mark’s wife is from Assiniboia, Sask, a small town about 45 minutes from the town I grew up in.… (plus d'informations)
It seems every year I need to have one bad Canada Reads experience, and this year it was Forgiveness.
This might be too harsh. It's not a terrible book. It's just that in its current incarnation, it is two badly connected books unhappily inhabiting a single set of covers, or one book missing badly needed connective tissue, written by someone who I really think needs counseling.
The narratives of his grandparents during World War II was the book's standout. The details were impressive, the stories were amazing, the people he paints were incredible. This is one of the books, and it was, on the whole, well done. Mark Sakamoto is not a fantastic writer; his sentences are often clumsy and, as other reviewers have pointed out, there were basic factual errors and typos that really ought to have been caught before publication. But on the whole, I enjoyed--if that's the right word for such tragic material--this section enormously.
The part about his mother was just weird. It didn't belong with the rest of it at all.
1. One of the forgiveness-heroes of the narrative, Ralph MacLean, never forgave his own father for being an abusive drunk. This should have been Sakamoto's clearest clue that the ties he was trying to draw between "forgiving a harmless representative of an ethnic group that did you enormous harm" is 100% completely different than "forgiving a person who themselves did you enormous harm." The result is a book in which Ralph MacLean goes off to war in part to get away from his abusive drunkard father who (at least according to the book) he never forgives nor reconciles with, experiences terrible injustice and deprivation, is able to forgive the Japanese people and/or individual Canadian-Japanese people (is it just the Japanese in Canada that he forgives, or all of them? It's never stated), and this inspires Mark Sakamoto to ... forgive his abusive drunkard mother. What?
2. Sakamoto relays a whole lot of damaging, codependent, problematic ideas in the section about his mother without any apparent awareness that they're damaging, codependent and problematic. *It is not a child's job to save an abusive alcoholic parent.* Ever. Period! Yet right up until the end of the book he wonders how his mother "forgave" him for "abandoning" her--he didn't abandon her! This is such a boilerplate enabling mindset and if he'd come to terms with that story as much as he seems to think he has, he'd have some awareness of it. There is *one* instance in that part of the book where he visits Al-Anon with his father--one! And if he ever went back, it's not described, nor does he show any evidence of participation in that kind of program in the way he reflects on and relates his story of growing up with his mother.
3. His apparent belief that it's required for children of abusive alcoholic parents to forgive those parents in order to be good parents themselves--his idea at the end that it would have been great for his mother to be in his kids' lives if only she hadn't killed herself with excessive drinking--I just. No. What a horrifyingly awful idea. She still would have been an abusive alcoholic, but with much more vulnerable baby humans to scar and hurt. What kind of father would bring his babies around to visit an abusive alcoholic, or speculate that this would have been a good or even moderately ok idea?
I think the author will find, if he ever cares to look into it, that most adult children of alcoholics and/or abusers find that they are more effective parents when they accept, move on, draw and enforce boundaries, protect their kids, and get help. Maybe forgiveness is a part of that, and maybe it isn't.
Oy.
So this book is one pretty good story of World War II heroics and overcoming, and one hot-mess of an abuse memoir, with some pretty thin and rotten strings connecting them. If you're going to read it, my advice is to put the book down when he starts talking about his mother.… (plus d'informations)
This might be too harsh. It's not a terrible book. It's just that in its current incarnation, it is two badly connected books unhappily inhabiting a single set of covers, or one book missing badly needed connective tissue, written by someone who I really think needs counseling.
The narratives of his grandparents during World War II was the book's standout. The details were impressive, the stories were amazing, the people he paints were incredible. This is one of the books, and it was, on the whole, well done. Mark Sakamoto is not a fantastic writer; his sentences are often clumsy and, as other reviewers have pointed out, there were basic factual errors and typos that really ought to have been caught before publication. But on the whole, I enjoyed--if that's the right word for such tragic material--this section enormously.
The part about his mother was just weird. It didn't belong with the rest of it at all.
1. One of the forgiveness-heroes of the narrative, Ralph MacLean, never forgave his own father for being an abusive drunk. This should have been Sakamoto's clearest clue that the ties he was trying to draw between "forgiving a harmless representative of an ethnic group that did you enormous harm" is 100% completely different than "forgiving a person who themselves did you enormous harm." The result is a book in which Ralph MacLean goes off to war in part to get away from his abusive drunkard father who (at least according to the book) he never forgives nor reconciles with, experiences terrible injustice and deprivation, is able to forgive the Japanese people and/or individual Canadian-Japanese people (is it just the Japanese in Canada that he forgives, or all of them? It's never stated), and this inspires Mark Sakamoto to ... forgive his abusive drunkard mother. What?
2. Sakamoto relays a whole lot of damaging, codependent, problematic ideas in the section about his mother without any apparent awareness that they're damaging, codependent and problematic. *It is not a child's job to save an abusive alcoholic parent.* Ever. Period! Yet right up until the end of the book he wonders how his mother "forgave" him for "abandoning" her--he didn't abandon her! This is such a boilerplate enabling mindset and if he'd come to terms with that story as much as he seems to think he has, he'd have some awareness of it. There is *one* instance in that part of the book where he visits Al-Anon with his father--one! And if he ever went back, it's not described, nor does he show any evidence of participation in that kind of program in the way he reflects on and relates his story of growing up with his mother.
3. His apparent belief that it's required for children of abusive alcoholic parents to forgive those parents in order to be good parents themselves--his idea at the end that it would have been great for his mother to be in his kids' lives if only she hadn't killed herself with excessive drinking--I just. No. What a horrifyingly awful idea. She still would have been an abusive alcoholic, but with much more vulnerable baby humans to scar and hurt. What kind of father would bring his babies around to visit an abusive alcoholic, or speculate that this would have been a good or even moderately ok idea?
I think the author will find, if he ever cares to look into it, that most adult children of alcoholics and/or abusers find that they are more effective parents when they accept, move on, draw and enforce boundaries, protect their kids, and get help. Maybe forgiveness is a part of that, and maybe it isn't.
Oy.
So this book is one pretty good story of World War II heroics and overcoming, and one hot-mess of an abuse memoir, with some pretty thin and rotten strings connecting them. If you're going to read it, my advice is to put the book down when he starts talking about his mother.… (plus d'informations)
1 
andrea_mcd | 11 autres critiques | Mar 10, 2020 |
andrea_mcd | 11 autres critiques | Mar 10, 2020 | Listes
Prix et récompenses
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 3
- Membres
- 149
- Popularité
- #139,413
- Évaluation
- 3.9
- Critiques
- 12
- ISBN
- 9