by Aleksandr Nikitenko & translated by Helen Saltz Jacobson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2001
An uplifting saga that offers an engrossing eyewitness view of Russian history and makes a valuable contribution to slave...
The memoirs of a former serf from early-19th-century Russia who writes poignantly of his fight for freedom.
Nikitenko provides a touching and lively account of the vicissitudes of his boyhood. A bright and imaginative child who loved learning and nature, Nikitenko was nevertheless (along with his entire family and some 300,000 other serfs) the personal property of one Count Sheremetev, who had the legal authority to dispose of the boy according to his will. The author’s family was unusual in a number of ways, however. First of all, they were descended not from serfs but from free Cossacks who had fallen into bondage—and the ancestral memory of this disgrace served to keep them from accepting their fate. Secondly, they were not peasants. Nikitenko’s father, Vasily, had gone to school and worked as an estate clerk rather than a farmhand. Because his father valued learning so highly, the author was able to receive a rather exceptional education for someone from his circumstances. In spite of his abilities, however, he could not, as a serf, go on to high school—and his resulting bitterness nearly drove him to suicide. Although Nikitenko did manage (at 14) to become a schoolteacher, he never abandoned his dream of entering the university. Eventually he was helped by influential friends to buy his own freedom, and his narrative ends with a description of his 1824 manumission. He later enrolled in St. Petersburg University, eventually becoming a professor there as well as a government censor. In 1841 he finally achieved his family’s release from bondage.
An uplifting saga that offers an engrossing eyewitness view of Russian history and makes a valuable contribution to slave literature. (3 maps; 25 illustrations)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-300-08414-5
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
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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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