Though the author is occasionally overzealous in her attempts to wed the political and historical with the personal and...
A lucid memoir of life and travel in the war-torn Middle East, in which the author explores the journalistic adage that “to write the story, you have to eat the meal.”
Former Christian Science Monitor Baghdad correspondent Ciezadlo traces the six years she spent as an American in the Middle East. The story begins with the author following her Lebanese-born husband to Baghdad in 2003, where the two began new lives as war correspondents. Through immersion in food and cooking, Ciezadlo grounded herself amid widespread instability while gaining special insight into a people forced to endure years of bloody conflict. For ordinary Iraqis, creating meals from handed-down recipes that recalled “the memory of other places, other worlds” brought them a comfort and freedom they could not find elsewhere. At the same time, Ciezadlo also discovered how food allowed her to transcend the lingering homesickness that came from “trying to straddle two different places at once.” When the situation for foreign journalists in Baghdad became too dangerous, the author and her husband relocated to the relative calm of Beirut, a city that had been rocked by civil war for nearly 20 years. The couple eventually settled into happy domesticity; for a brief moment, among her husband’s relatives and the bounty of delicious food, the Ciezadlo felt satisfyingly rooted. However, they soon found themselves caught in yet another war as Israel began a military campaign against Hezbollah, which included the bombardment of Beirut. A re-emergence of old hostilities between Shiite and Sunni Muslims soon followed, causing more unrest. Saddened by “the aftertaste of hate,” Ciezadlo realized that while “the war would never end,” internecine conflicts did not diminish the fact that “[h]ome was wherever you broke bread with people you loved.”
Though the author is occasionally overzealous in her attempts to wed the political and historical with the personal and domestic, this ambitious and multilayered book is as much a feast for the mind as for the heart.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8393-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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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