A sketch of the writer, but one with crisp lines and sure-handed strokes.
The life of celebrated essayist, novelist, poet and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (1919–1987), told in swift succinctness by the author of such philosophical and historical works as Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence (2009).
Lang (Emeritus, Philosophy/SUNY, Albany) approaches this entry in the publisher’s Jewish Lives series from a variety of perspectives. He presents the facts of Levi’s life but also looks closely at his writings, philosophy and identity as a Jew. Lang organizes his text in a way both playful and educative: His first chapter is “The End,” and the preface comes at the end. The author begins with the controversy surrounding Levi’s death—suicide or no? (Lang says yes.) Then he carries us back to 1943 and Levi’s arrest by the Nazis in Italy and his transport to Auschwitz. Lang offers some Italian history and notes that the tiny Jewish population of Italy tended to support Mussolini—at first. After the war, Levi began writing, and Lang takes us through several of the works, observing that Levi had admired the writing of Jack London and that his relationship with Elie Wiesel was uneasy. He continually reminds us of Levi’s education as a chemist and the jobs in the chemical industry he held. He shows the considerable influence of chemical training on Levi’s The Periodic Table (1975). A tricky chapter is the one he devotes to Levi’s Jewishness. The author argues that Levi’s later contention that the Holocaust accentuated that identity is a bit disingenuous: Levi was immersed in the Jewish secular world before the war. He’d been an early supporter of Zionism but not for himself. Lang’s philosophical bent emerges clearly in his chapter about Levi’s thought, and he discusses five aspects of it, including thoughts about human nature, justice and God.
A sketch of the writer, but one with crisp lines and sure-handed strokes.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-13723-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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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