An infectious memoir from someone engagingly candid about her temporary homeland's limitations—and her own.
The story of a British academic who, intending to fulfill her childhood dream of northern living, took a university job in Reykjavik.
Moss (Creative Writing/Warwick Univ.) arrived in 2009, 16 years after the summer visit that was her only actual previous contact with Iceland. Finding herself living in the country she had fantasized about for so long—and with two small children in tow—wasn’t traumatic, exactly, but it was obvious to both the author and everyone around her that she was a stranger in her new country. She determined to bike in a land where SUVs are the preferred mode of transportation and the weather is hostile more often than not. Unable to speak Icelandic and unwilling to speak English, she was so clearly on the outside looking in that it would have been foolish to pretend otherwise. Still, her memoir never veers into the maudlin, a refreshing perspective from someone who was so obviously out of her element. Though Moss and her family didn’t make it to many tourist attractions (extreme cold not being ideal for toddlers), this actually makes the book better. By shielding her family from the winter and long drives in terrifying traffic, the author managed to lead what seems in her recounting to be an extremely Icelandic life. She achieved an understanding of the land and people, revealed here in subtle “aha” moments that readers will enjoy. She realized, for example, that Iceland's financial crisis, at its height during the year of her residency, was especially traumatic for a society that considered itself truly egalitarian. Much of what Moss learned, or learned to accept, is summed up when she writes, “The stories told by numbers and research are quite different from the stories we tell ourselves and each other. This is not to say that either is wrong.”
An infectious memoir from someone engagingly candid about her temporary homeland's limitations—and her own.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61902-122-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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
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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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