by Robert H. Patton ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 16, 1994
A descendant's affectionate and affecting account of those who helped make Patton a celebrated family name in the often violent annals of the New World. Drawing on the private papers and memorabilia of his forebears, Patton offers an anecdotal, generation-spanning chronicle that extends back to the flight of Huguenots from 16th- century France. While he focuses on George S. Patton Jr., the four- star general who won enduring fame as a WW II commander, the author devotes considerable attention to other family notables, including several remarkable women and two fugitives from British justice. One, Hugh Mercer, fought with Bonnie Prince Charlie before fleeing Scotland for the colonies, where he became a general in the Revolutionary War. The other early arrival in America, a wanted criminal, changed his name to Patton (popular among ÇmigrÇ highlanders, the name means ``king's pensioner'' in Gaelic). Covered as well are those who bore arms for the Confederacy and were subsequently obliged to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives in California. Beyond reporting his decision to break tradition and pursue a career outside the Army, the author has precious little to say for himself. He does, though, pay graceful, if brief, tribute to his own father, a retired major general with a chestful of decorations from Korea and Vietnam. Against the odds, moreover, Patton provides fresh, human-scale perspectives on his legendary grandfather, whose exploits are writ large in the pages of military history. History in an intimate, personal vein. (16 pages b&w photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: March 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-517-59068-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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