by Aida Edemariam ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 20, 2018
A flawed but richly evocative tale of family and international history.
A Guardian journalist tells the story of her Ethiopian grandmother’s remarkable life.
In this ambitious, elegantly descriptive, but occasionally disjointed narrative, Edemariam interweaves the story of her grandmother Yetemegnu's eventful life with the tumultuous history of Ethiopia. Yetemegnu was born in the northern Ethiopian city of Gondar in 1916. Born into a well-respected family, she was married off to Tsèga, a 30-year-old “nonentity” of a priest “from the sticks” of neighboring Gojjam before she was 10 years old. Against expectation, however, Tsèga proved his worth to Yetemegnu’s family by petitioning for, and earning, the position of chief priest of Gondar from the Ethiopian empress at the time, Zewditu, a year after his marriage. Edemariam’s grandmother saw her husband’s fortunes rise with the coming of a new ruler, the Emperor Haile Selassie, as she entered motherhood in her early teens. By the time she had given birth to her sixth child and buried a son, Italy had invaded Ethiopia and declared war on its former “ally in the Horn of Africa,” Britain. After Italy left and Selassie returned from exile, Yetemegnu witnessed her husband’s fall from political grace, his imprisonment for supposed “plots against the emperor,” and his death shortly after his release. The newly widowed mother of nine fought to successfully convince the emperor to restore her land that Tsèga’s enemies had stripped from her family while stubbornly refusing to remarry. Yetemegnu then watched her children begin lives in lands as far away as Canada while Ethiopia descended into a long and bitter civil war. At times profoundly lyrical and other times fractured and difficult to follow, Edemariam's book offers a glimpse into a singularly fascinating culture and history as it celebrates the courage, resilience, and grace of an extraordinary woman.
A flawed but richly evocative tale of family and international history.Pub Date: March 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-213603-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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 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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