by Gertrude Stein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 2013
A unique, romantic memoir and a perfect introduction to a unique American voice.
A contrarian expatriate’s impressionistic rendering of her adopted country, just before the ax fell.
Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) said that writers “have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they live really.” She would know; born in Pennsylvania, she moved to Paris in 1903 and never left. Writing this slim 1940 volume in the looming shadow of the Nazi invasion, Stein comports herself as an American de Tocqueville, seeking to define a country she knew intimately but which never stopped surprising her. France was the locus of “logic and fashion,” a barometer of civilization, and the place where 20th-century art and literature were created (often in her own salon, a second home to Hemingway and Picasso, among others). As Adam Gopnik writes in a useful introduction, the book is “a picture of Paris by an American who thinks as Americans think, and we see America in the picture when she thinks she is showing us France.” Stein wrestles with her subject, saying what it is by saying what it isn’t, offering up observations both astute and sentimental. “Foreigners were not romantic to [the people of France], they were just facts, nothing was sentimental they were just there, and strangely enough it did not make them make the art and literature of the twentieth century but it made them be the inevitable background for it.” It’s an idealized picture, in many ways; the people “cannot really lie,” and “children are never really harshly treated.” Stein didn’t fully grasp the Nazi threat, but she sensed it.
A unique, romantic memoir and a perfect introduction to a unique American voice.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0871403742
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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