A narrowly focused portrait of idealism in the face of oppression that is very nearly past its sell-by date.
An American journalist delves into the fringes of Internet activism in three countries forged from communist oppression.
New America Foundation senior fellow and former Wall Street Journal writer Parker draws on her rich education in international relations and a wide range of fellowships to examine how the Internet is changing—or not changing—cultures in China, Russia and Cuba. As most readers know, the suppression of activism in these countries has a long, shameful history, so Parker uses her contacts and experience to quiz the new types of citizens emerging due to the Web. The book’s fundamental flaw, however, is in couching itself as a perceptive analysis of how Web-based activists inspired change in recent revolutionary hotbeds like Egypt and Tunisia. However, Parker presents an interesting but scattered collection of profiles of postmodern activists, none of whom seem to be as effective as they would like. The usual suspects include Jing Zhao, the political blogger who aggravates the Chinese government as “Michael Anti”; Russian nationalist Alexei Navalny, who found out the hard way how serious Vladimir Putin is about uprisings; and Reinaldo Escobar and Yoani Sanchez, the married couple from Cuba who use their international connections to speak truth to power under the Castro regime. There are nuances to the situations in each country, and Parker finds China the most changed by its experience with the world online, while Cuba remains isolated. But they all seem to share the fear, apathy and isolation that Parker identifies as the tenets of suppression. “A long tradition of citizen informers has broken down the social fabric,” Parker writes of Cuba. “This decentralized paranoia is what makes coordinated rebellion so difficult, and the government knows it. You never know whom to fear, so you fear everyone.”
A narrowly focused portrait of idealism in the face of oppression that is very nearly past its sell-by date.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-17695-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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
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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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