The third entry in Yale's Annals of Communism series consists of documents on the fate of the Romanov dynasty, including official orders, personal letters, diaries, and recollections, interspersed with a commentary by Steinberg (History/Yale Univ.). The documents, found in the Archives of the Russian Federation in Moscow (where coauthor Krustalâv is historian-archivist), run from late February 1917, just before the Russian Revolution, up to the execution of the former Tsar Nicholas II with his family and servants in July 1918. It reveals the tsar and his family alternately oblivious to the mood of the times (Alexandra writes to her husband that the riots in St. Petersburg are ``a hooligan movement''); pathetic (in a letter from Nicholas to his sister, ``For me, night is the best part of the dayat least you forget yourself for a while''); and noble (one of the tsar's daughters writes to an officer supposedly organizing their escape that it would be ``ignoble'' to leave without the servants ``after they have followed us voluntarily into exile''). On the vexed question of the responsibility for the murder of the tsar and his family, the documents are inconclusive. Steinberg thinks it likely that Lenin approved the murder but that ``no direct proof has ever surfaced.'' He concludes that the version closest to the evidence is that the Urals Soviet was authorized to execute the tsar and his family without trial if the military situation deteriorated. Most chilling is the recollection of the commissar who murdered them. Writing of the tsar's young hemophiliac son, he noted that ``Aleksei remained seated, petrified, and I finished him off.'' A mixed bag of documents, alternately the mundane record of a largely uneventful captivity and the cruel record of an execution, with first-class analysis from Steinberg.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-300-06557-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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