by Anna Larina ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 15, 1993
A monumental narration of the travails of Russian Communism, served up by the widow of one of its first founders—and victims. Larina grew up in a family of prominent socialist intellectuals: Her father, a well-known economist and a close friend of Lenin's, served as a mentor to an entire generation of young revolutionaries. One of these, Nikolai Bukharin, became Larina's husband and part of the inner circle of the Bolshevik leadership. After the 1917 revolution, Bukharin worked as an adviser to Lenin during the turmoil of the civil war and its aftermath, and was ultimately responsible for many of the ideas embodied in Lenin's New Economic Policy of the early 1920's. Stalin's rise to power, however, carried an enduring chill into Russia's political atmosphere and doomed the careers and lives of anyone whose prominence or charisma seemed to threaten the elaborate ``cult of personality'' that maintained the dictator's authority. Bukharin was one of the earliest victims, denounced as a traitor and ``convicted'' of absurd and incredible crimes at one of the most elaborate show trials of the era. After his execution in 1938, Larina's life became an uninterrupted chronicle of harassment and exile: as a chesir (the relative of a counter- revolutionary), she was separated from her son and interned in one gulag after another for the next 30 years. Larina's memoir, though, is measured, vivid, and strikingly free of malice; her tone throughout is one of absolute self-reliance, the sustaining confidence of a thoroughly independent woman who believed all along that the day of her vindication would ultimately arrive. Exceptionally moving and strong: an eloquent statement of human endurance and superhuman faith. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03025-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
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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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