Charming, melancholic and engrossing.
In this fascinating personal history, the rise and fall of a family’s fortunes parallels the travails of 20th-century Poland.
Tarnowski’s account of his glamorous aristocratic forbears is charming enough that readers will forgive, and eventually come to embrace, the fact that every woman is more beautiful and plucky than the last, every man a dashing war hero. The drama begins on the eve of World War I, when Tarnowski’s grandfather shoots himself in the chest just hours after his wedding. Count Hieronim Tarnowski survives, but rumors of sexual “difficulties” dog his marriage, one of many failed unions in a family whose romantic adventures and serial partner-swapping cause more damage than the Nazi or Soviet armies. Driven by bed-hopping, the Tarnowski saga moves from halcyon days of lavish Polish estates with wild boars kept as pets through benighted refugee transports to desert scenes with Polish regiments in Palestine and Egypt. The author, a former reporter for Reuters, was born in Geneva while his parents were fleeing the Nazi occupation of Poland. He recreates the family history through interviews with his paternal aunt Sophie, a headstrong beauty who founded the Polish Red Cross in Cairo, and his elderly father Stas, an abusive but compelling cad who beat his young wife (the author’s mother Chouquette) and betrayed her on both their wedding night and the night their son was born. Anecdotes of glistening parties and heady indiscretions are delivered in a light tone that belies the tragedies faced during those years by the family—and the continent. Both of Sophie’s young sons died before they turned two; Tarnowski’s mother and maternal aunt committed suicide after the war. The author gives only passing glances to the concomitant horrors of the trenches and the concentration camps. Their privileged position in life protected the Tarnowskis, who destroyed themselves from the inside.
Charming, melancholic and engrossing.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36740-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
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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