A dramatic story, well told, of an authentic hero who has been rightly dubbed “America’s Oskar Schindler.”
The stirring story of an American journalist who, working in Vichy France, helped thousands of artists and intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Mann and Marc Chagall, escape Nazi persecution.
Little in Varian Fry’s early background suggested that he would become a heroic rescuer of refugees. An only child from a privileged background, Fry grew up a spoiled, somewhat arrogant hypochondriac aesthete, and intellectual. But in one of the jobs he drifted through after graduating from Harvard, Fry witnessed the beatings of Jews in Berlin and, as a result, tried to awaken readers to the growing Nazi menace. After France fell to Hitler in June 1940, Fry, his wife, and others helped organize an Emergency Rescue Committee dedicated to saving intellectuals and others trapped in France. It’s at this point that Marino’s (Herschel: The Boy Who Started World War II, 1997) narrative, previously largely a biography of an interesting but obscure intellectual, turns into an account that reads like spy fiction. Fry arrived in Marseilles and founded the Centre Americain de Secours, ostensibly dedicated to legal charitable activities but really devoted to the rescue, by illegal means, of intellectuals in danger of persecution by the Nazis. Aided by an unlikely combination of expatriate liberals, Communists, intellectuals, and members of French criminal organizations, Fry helped approximately 2,000 writers, artists, and scientists (and others, including escaped British prisoners of war) escape across the Pyrenees into Spain, using false documents procured by Fry. Despite increasingly sinister harassment by Vichy’s Fascist regime and the Gestapo, sniping by isolationist State Department officials, unwanted publicity by some of the refugees, and diminishing support by pusillanimous or jealous colleagues in New York, Fry continued his secret work until August 1941, when he was expelled from France. He died in 1967.
A dramatic story, well told, of an authentic hero who has been rightly dubbed “America’s Oskar Schindler.”Pub Date: Aug. 24, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-20356-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
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
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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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