A timely investigation that turns up “sad confirmation that animus and violence and expulsion always end up screwing...
A cultural commentator turns her acute observational skills and journalistic skills to the mystery of her own heritage.
When Wagner, currently an anchor and contributor for CBS News and a contributing editor at the Atlantic, started pulling the threads of history between her Burmese mother and her American father, it didn’t take long for the perceptive journalist to see that things could get messy. Her thinking about American identity harkens back to a 1993 Time cover story that heralded a multicultural woman as “The New Face of America,” which explained “how immigrants are shaping the world’s first multicultural society”—hence her concept of “Futureface.” The narrative is part Mary Roach–style, participation-heavy research, part family history, and part exploration of existential loneliness. “I wanted definitive proof that I was not alone, that I belonged….It was a mystery to be solved—several mysteries, to be honest—and, oh, did I love mysteries,” writes Wagner. “I was on the case: telephone, magnifying glass, library card, passport in hand.” After introducing her family’s complex genealogy, including a hint of Jewish ancestry, Wagner recounts her trip to Burma, where she discovered the same distressing cultural fracturing she has been reporting on in America. Without discovering any documents of substance there, she headed home to go through the complex history of Henry Wagner, her great-grandfather, who brought his family from Luxembourg to Iowa. Wagner picks apart the “White Immigrant Origin Story,” digs through digital and physical records, and subjects herself and her family to scores of DNA tests, the results of which proved “less than convincing.” Regardless of whether Wagner solved her mystery, the journey is worth taking; it serves as a welcome reminder that tribalism and xenophobia are dangerous but ultimately futile threats. As the author writes, the search for ancestry is “a reminder that ultimately, we are all in this together—still.”
A timely investigation that turns up “sad confirmation that animus and violence and expulsion always end up screwing everyone, even the people doing the expelling.”Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9794-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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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