An invaluable document of history as well as a riveting literary narrative, spirited out of France by Saint-Exupéry yet...
An extraordinary account of a French couple’s fleeing of Paris just in front of the Germans in June 1940, followed by a despairing stint among some eagerly appeasing villagers.
A kind of magical thinking takes place in the mind of this first-person narrator as he and his wife were mired in a German-occupied village on their way south by car from Paris. A novelist and journalist who experienced the trench warfare in World War I, Werth (1878-1955) addresses this account to his best friend, pilot and author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, as a way of establishing facts without elaboration. These facts indeed grow increasingly nonsensical. Moving in a daze of denial, the narrator admits that he was “in no hurry to leave” Paris, yet on the advice of “A,” he decided to put “sixty kilometers between the Germans and us.” The road south was clogged, as cars broke down, people drove wagons pulled by horses, and pedestrians were able to walk faster than the caravan—many of the limping, downtrodden pedestrians were the routed French soldiers. News was fluid, but gossip about the Germans’ actual location was rampant, and angry cries of “France is betrayed!” were common—though the narrator wanted to ask: by whom? Hoping to reach and cross the Loire but thwarted by Germans swarming over the countryside, the narrator and his wife (as well as their nanny, who disappears at some point in the narrative) moved from a hospitable farming family in Chapelon to shelter with a horrifying pair of German-speaking farm wives in Les Douciers, where the narrator watched in a “hallucinatory” moment as one offered the invading Germans champagne. Returned to Chapelon, Werth chronicles strange, intimate encounters between the French and Germans in moving, vivid detail.
An invaluable document of history as well as a riveting literary narrative, spirited out of France by Saint-Exupéry yet somehow "lost."Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61219-425-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Melville House
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 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
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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