A chorus of lyrical voices singing hopefully about a most contentious, divisive, and violent situation.
Two co-founders of the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest), mother and son, collect an array of emotional pieces from this international gathering of writers begun in 2008.
Editors Soueif (Cairo: Memoir of a City Transformed, 2014, etc.) and Hamilton (The City Always Wins, 2017, etc.) begin and end the collection—she with an introduction and an essay; he with the longest piece, which encapsulates the conference since 2008. There are some poems, as well, including Suheir Hammad’s affecting “The Gaza Suite,” whose sections are distributed throughout. The collection includes plenty of notable writers familiar to Western readers: the late Henning Mankell, Geoff Dyer, Alice Walker, and Chinua Achebe, whose offerings range from tributes to the PalFest itself to accounts of their own experiences attending. There is also a touching account of Richard Ford’s nearly breaking down while reading a Seamus Heaney poem. Most of the writers, though, are from the region, and their messages—oft repeated—are clear: Israel is, in their view, basically running an open-air prison; countless innocent civilians, including many children, have died; Israel is in the process of erasing the evidence of many generations of inhabitants. These, of course, are not messages that will attract Israel’s many supporters, but others in the West—who, as some of the authors here point out, know little about the conflict—will no doubt be alarmed at the vast array of grim detail and example. Although the writers concur that Israel is doing something awful, there are few allusions to a violent response. Instead, the writers express the belief that words will be the things with feathers that will eventually bring attention—and peace. Other notable contributors include J.M. Coetzee, Raja Shehadeh, Michael Ondaatje, Claire Messud, Teju Cole, Pankaj Mishra, and Kamila Shamsie.
A chorus of lyrical voices singing hopefully about a most contentious, divisive, and violent situation.Pub Date: July 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-884-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
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