A vivid, timely story of survival. If spies live in boredom punctuated by flashes of terrifying action, then refugees on the...
The story of a boy’s flight from a rapidly unraveling, murderous Afghanistan.
Passarlay was 12 years old when his mother gave him strict orders: “Be brave. This is for your own good….However bad it gets, don’t come back.” His father, suspected by U.S. troops of cooperating with the Taliban, had been killed during a raid on their house, and this was no time for his sons to stick around. Thus begins the author’s tale of his long odyssey west, a journey that would take him halfway around the world. Passarlay and his brother were separated early on, so the author had to survive on the wiles of a 12-year-old, which boiled down to him getting taken at every turn, giving a child’s trust to one smooth- talking or brutish fixer after another. Occasionally, Passarlay’s youthful voice sounds a little too worldly—“Despair filled my pockets like stones”—but the author provides all manner of small incidents and moments of awakening that leave a lasting impression: “I had never see a blonde woman before,” he notes in Germany; “I had had such high expectations for Paris, the city where perfume rained from the skies. And yet all I had witnessed was a dirty, smelly, and cold city, filled with Parisians who shied away from us in horror.” Mostly, this journey is a mare’s- nest of misery—dirty, hungry, homesick, scared—but Passarlay had one trick up his sleeve. As a clever young kid, he could hide and stow away. He eventually made it to London, traumatized—“The next day I calmly walked into a pharmacy and bought a bottle of paracetamol. Then I swallowed them all”—and the nightmares linger, eight years after.
A vivid, timely story of survival. If spies live in boredom punctuated by flashes of terrifying action, then refugees on the run live in constant high anxiety punctuated by flashes of horror and panic.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-244387-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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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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