A colorful though repetitious memoir of life in a small Lebanese village just after the Second World War. Accawi’s first book is a lament for the lost world of his youth—for the sights, smells, sounds, and rituals of Magdaluna (“the tower of the moon”), a tiny village that now exists only in memory. To connect these reminiscences, Accawi compares himself, for reasons that are not immediately clear, to a pyramid builder, whose “stones” are the ideas, events, people, pets, and, most curiously, the small appliances which have shaped his life. The Magdalunians emerge here as an entertaining if feckless bunch who tend their goat herds and olive groves, marry their cousins, and generally live their lives with little contact with the outside world. When the modern world begins to intrude, traditions that have lasted for centuries—everything from baking bread to gathering at the village spring to dancing the Dabki—quickly disappear. Accawi’s stories, told from a child’s perspective, are peopled with memorable characters such as Teta, his one-eyed Presbyterian grandmother, and Abu George, the virile village blacksmith who stands on his roof and bellows the latest news in a voice that can be heard for miles around. Yet this is a book in which small appliances loom very large. The author devotes entire chapters to the coming of the radio, the gramophone, and the telephone, among others, blaming each in its turn for the village’s downfall, before melodramatically pointing his finger at the automobile, specifically “a shiny black DeSoto standing like a dark, massive monument upon what looks to me like the tomb of the world.” Strangely, the fact that Magdaluna was actually leveled by Muslim fighters during the Lebanese civil war is mentioned almost as an afterthought. Taken individually, these stories can transport the reader to another world (—The Telephone” was included in The Best American Essays 1998). Taken together, they sound so much alike that the exotic finally becomes mundane.
Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-8070-7008-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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
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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