by Martin Fletcher ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 4, 2008
An eye-opening, deeply felt memoir that brings us behind the cameras in the world’s deadliest hot spots.
Veteran TV war correspondent Fletcher describes several decades of risking life, limb and sanity to chase down stories on the front lines.
Now Tel Aviv bureau chief for NBC News, the author gives a sobering but unforgettable account of a life spent sifting through some of humanity’s worst atrocities. He explains his career choice in part as a way of confronting the loss of much of his extended family in the Holocaust. Spurning a comfortable desk job, he began as a BBC correspondent in the early 1970s and headed out into the field. There he discovered he had a nose for news. More than once, it almost cost him his head, but it also enabled him to submit memorable, prizewinning reports from war zones like Kosovo, Somalia, Cyprus, Rwanda and the Middle East, where the author has lived with his wife and family since the first Gulf War. Although Fletcher provides ample tales of heavy drinking and womanizing with colorful colleagues in his early years, much of his work involved slogging through mud, mountain and jungle in search of grim stories of famine and slaughter. He describes watching colleagues blown to bits by land mines a few feet in front of him, interviewing murderous Somali warlords and witnessing genocide up close in places like Kosovo and Rwanda. Perhaps his most chilling interviews have been clandestine West Bank meetings with Palestinian terrorists dedicated to killing Jews, including the author’s own wife and children. Through it all, Fletcher tries but cannot fully explain his love for a job that has brought him face-to-face with human suffering and mass carnage. But he does candidly acknowledge the emotional toll it has taken, as well as the sheer luck that has kept him alive.
An eye-opening, deeply felt memoir that brings us behind the cameras in the world’s deadliest hot spots.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37118-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Reyna Grande ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 28, 2012
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
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by Joshua Davis ; adapted by Reyna Grande
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edited by Reyna Grande & Sonia Guiñansaca
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by Reyna Grande
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