Effectively employing a subdued tone, Morgan paints a grim picture of hopelessness leading to desperate militancy, reminding...
An unforgettable cautionary narrative of the author’s days as a French combatant and military journalist during the war for Algerian independence.
Biographer and historian Morgan (A Covert Life, 1999, etc.) spent most of his youth in America, but he was also a French citizen, subject to conscription in that nation’s military. One day he was a cub reporter for a newspaper in Worcester, Mass., the next found him a soldier headed to Algeria. It was 1956, not a happy time to be steaming into the Bay of Algiers. Urban terrorism saw its first systematic use there in the campaign of bombings and assassinations by Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN); the French adopted an open display of barbarity in response. Morgan doesn’t pretend that he behaved differently at first: He admits to having beaten a suspected insurgent to death during interrogation. Retelling that dreadful story in a hollow, detached voice, all he can say is that it disfigured him for life. Fortunately, he soon moved to work as a writer for a government newspaper; at this propaganda sheet churning out “perception management,” he could study the Algerian situation without having to participate in human destruction. Morgan knows how to drive a narrative forward, but the story comes wrapped in dispassion, as if the whole situation is too grotesque for him to hold it close. Yet there is incredible firsthand material: the French paratroopers’ methods of torture, the specifics of FLN bombings and the step-by-step dismemberment of the FLN in Algiers. For those whose images of the war and its combatants were shaped by Gillo Pontecorvo’s pro-FLN The Battle of Algiers, the book’s most startling element may be the wrecking job done on the image of Yacef Saadi, the organization’s less-than-heroic leader in the city.
Effectively employing a subdued tone, Morgan paints a grim picture of hopelessness leading to desperate militancy, reminding us that electroshocks and guillotines rarely solve anything.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-085224-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Smithsonian/Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
