An unvarnished, mostly bewildered and touchingly human memoir.
Two years as a Mormon missionary in Belgium.
Harline (European History/BYU; Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America, 2011, etc.) spends a good deal of this reminiscence clowning around in a charming fashion, like the harmless and naïve teenager he was when he accepted a two-year mission to proselytize the Mormon faith in Belgium. Unfortunately, Belgium was a land of Catholics, and Harline had been taught “that the Catholic Church was wicked. And weird. The Church of the Devil. The Whore of All the Earth….Wouldn’t all those Belgian people in Catholic darkness be glad to see me?” However, the Belgians were not in the market for Harline’s goods, and the author knew he was not cut from the proselytizer’s cloth. He did not like the doors shut in his face, the poor Belgian weather, the dogs sent out to investigate his presence, the occasional display of firearms and, probably most of all, the near misses. Furthermore, he had to conduct himself in Dutch, a language he found “close to alarming.” But he was not without faith and humor; he was not just a devout young man, but a searcher. He was open to the sublime, and he found it in Belgium’s timeless places, such as a forest near the village of Godsheide in the late-afternoon winter light, where “we knew we were in some other world, like we and every person, thing, and place we’d ever known, done, or been were all there too, at once…toujours vu, always seen.” Along the way, Harline learned a lot about being himself and had many profound experiences. In his memoir, he displays a fine mix of pathos and hilarity as he describes imagining what people made of his Dutch, laughing at his “stainless-steel suit,” and giving thanks for the virtues learned and the connections made.
An unvarnished, mostly bewildered and touchingly human memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8028-7150-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Eerdmans
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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