by Allan G. Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 12, 2015
Readers uncomfortable with the author’s message may wish that he did not repeat it so often, and those expecting a son’s...
One man’s journey into his family’s past and a sociologist’s meditation on white America’s history of greed and genocide.
When Johnson (The First Thing and the Last, 2010, etc.) asked his dying father where he wished his ashes to be placed, the response that it made no difference to him set the author on a journey to the Midwest to learn about his father and his Norwegian forefathers. His journal of that solo trip, often an hour-by-hour record of staying in bleak hotels and driving through disappearing towns, is steeped in his shame and grief for the injustice committed by white settlers who destroyed or exiled the people that occupied the land they wanted and claimed as their own. The kind relatives and friendly people he meets along the way seem oblivious to the history that torments Johnson, shrugging it off as a war over land that their side won. Finding the cemetery where his great-grandfather was buried, he secretly dug a hole for his father’s ashes, doing, as he writes, “what I could with what I was given.” It was not a satisfactory moment. What it means to be white, what it means to be American, and what it means to be from a place and to belong to it are questions that Johnson raises throughout the book. He is painfully aware that as a descendant of those who took the land from others, dispossessing and displacing them, he is today the beneficiary of acts he did not perform. “It has been my destiny to go down into the cellars of this nation’s history and then return,” he writes. “In doing that, I have had to become familiar with dark nights of the soul, to grow accustomed to the belly of the whale.”
Readers uncomfortable with the author’s message may wish that he did not repeat it so often, and those expecting a son’s gentle memoir will be in for a surprise. This is a difficult journey.Pub Date: June 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4399-1245-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Temple Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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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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