Courageous and inspirational, without a wasted word.
A book that no one would ever want to write proves powerfully, painfully difficult to read.
One of the many casualties of the November 2015 terrorist attack on concertgoers at the Bataclan Theater in Paris was Leiris’ young wife, the mother of their 17-month-old son. His grief transcends any attempt at literary criticism, but his craft as a journalist allows him to focus on detail and avoid the bathos of sentimentality, thus allowing his shellshocked horror to stand on its own. The narrative is written like diary entries, fresh with emotional immediacy, beginning with reports of the attack while he was at home, waiting for his wife’s return. Then come his responses, and his responses to other responses, as he comes to terms with his belief that dwelling on hating the perpetrators is not the way to keep his wife alive for him and his son. “People ask me if I’ve forgotten or forgiven,” he writes. “I forgive nothing, I forget nothing. I am not getting over anything, and certainly not so quickly. When everyone else has gone back to his or her life, we will still be living with this. This is our story. To refuse it would be to betray it.” The fulcrum of the narrative (which spans just under two weeks) is an open letter to the terrorists, posted on Facebook, where he writes, “I will not give you the satisfaction of hating you….You have failed. I will not change.” It’s a complex response to a tragic loss, and while it would be minimizing his loss and grief to call the book cathartic, it is certainly part of a response that allows him to conclude, “today, the funeral procession is over. It is toward our new life that we walk.”
Courageous and inspirational, without a wasted word.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2211-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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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