Readable but sometimes maudlin, adding up to not much more than notes for a future biographer.
A portrait of the late Swedish crime novelist by a longtime friend and fellow crusading journalist.
“I’m fifty, damn it!” Thus, writes Kurdish-Swedish writer Baksi, Larsson’s last words. Felled by a heart attack, Larsson—born Karl Stig-Erland Larsson in 1954, his nom de guerre a teenage adaptation—had crammed more than a few decades of living into his sleepless days. It should come as no mystery to fans of his work, and particularly of the Millennium Trilogy, that Larsson was fascinated by the dark, hidden corners of Swedish society, and particularly by the neo-Nazi element that lay just beneath the surface and was (and is) more influential than outsiders might ever have expected. Hired as a graphic artist by a newspaper, but then drifting into investigative journalism, Larsson threw himself into the antiracist, antifascist cause, where he met Baksi, the editor of a paper that addressed immigrant issues. Larsson’s devotion to that fight and his assertions that the neo-Nazis had thoroughly infiltrated the Swedish police led to numerous death threats, and he was always in trouble with his editors—for one thing, since he refused to even pretend to objectivity. Baksi attributes his early death to stress, though the 20 cups of coffee and two or three packs of cigarettes he consumed daily probably didn’t help. Larsson’s antifascist journalism defined him, but readers outside Sweden will take greater interest in the genesis of his crime novels. Baksi provides only a little insight there, noting that Larsson composed all three books in the trilogy at the same time, writing a chapter in one book, then a chapter in the second, then a chapter in the third; he also enumerates Larsson’s many influences, from Harlan Ellison to Elizabeth George.
Readable but sometimes maudlin, adding up to not much more than notes for a future biographer.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60598-174-1
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
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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