by Laura Kasinof ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 7, 2014
An action-packed account of the civil war in Yemen from a woman who experienced it firsthand.
How one woman became a war journalist almost by accident.
Fed up with life in New York City, where she felt stuck in a rut, 20-something Kasinof longed to go to the Middle East and write freelance articles for a living. When a friend suggested she move to Yemen, a country that in 2009 seemed safer than Egypt or Syria, the author leapt at the idea. Having studied Arabic in college, she quickly fell in love with the hospitable people of Yemen and even became a minicelebrity when she played an American in a Yemeni soap opera. She had no idea that the country would soon become a hotbed of anti-government protests, which escalated into a full-blown war between supporters of the dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and those who wanted him ousted from power. Suddenly, Kasinof was in the middle of the gunfire, writing news reports for the New York Times and loving (almost) every minute of it. In this debut memoir, the author provides vivid details of those years, bringing readers into the heat of the conflicts, into the mosques-turned-hospitals filled with the wounded and dying, and into the sitting rooms where she interviewed some of the most important men in Yemen while they chewed khat leaves together. The tensions ran high, as did the adrenaline, which Kasinof admits she became addicted to. She placed herself in some sketchy situations in hopes of an interview, but her affection for the Yemeni people made her want to stay there and report what she saw to the world. Fortunately for readers, she’s taken those moments and shared them, offering a moving portrait of life as a war correspondent.
An action-packed account of the civil war in Yemen from a woman who experienced it firsthand.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1628724455
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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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