by Peter Quinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 15, 2007
Well written and researched, showcasing the author’s pride in his Irish Catholic heritage.
Uneven collection of essays, articles, reviews and speeches on the history and identity of the Irish in America.
Speechwriter turned historical novelist Quinn (Hour of the Cat, 2005, etc.) offers much here to delight, annoy and perhaps even offend. Almost every piece demonstrates his substantial knowledge of history and his wide reading. He’s particularly well informed about the potato famine, whose spectral presence haunts the text. (In two places, the author notes some similarities to the Holocaust.) Many died in Ireland; many more immigrated to the United States, where, as the author observes, they were not greeted with joy. In one of his strongest essays, “Closets Full of Bones,” Quinn notes the similarity of the brutal hostility and discrimination the Irish faced to today’s hysterical reactions to new waves of immigrants. The reason our politicians, public and media pundits are so exercised is simple, he writes: “They don’t know history.” Another fine piece, “The Bronx Is Burning,” blends the author’s personal experiences as a court officer in the Bronx’s Landlord and Tenant Court with some insightful comments about immigration, poverty and hopelessness. Graceful writing and a seamless blending of historical and personal material distinguish the book throughout, though some of the early entries land in unsurprising, even sentimental places. “Faith and Imagination,” a section containing five meditations on the Irish and the Roman Catholic church, may annoy Protestants and non-Christians: Quinn is a proud Catholic and expresses not the slightest doubt about the divinity of Jesus or the existence of hell.
Well written and researched, showcasing the author’s pride in his Irish Catholic heritage.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2007
ISBN: 1-58567-870-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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