A moving story of characters, arresting to begin with, who rise to acts of extreme courage.
The romantic history of French journalist Yung-de Prévaux’s parents—both of whom died in the French Resistance and about whom Yung-de Prévaux knew nothing until she was 24—written with captivating directness, passion, and formality.
Yung-de Prévaux was a student in Paris in 1966 when she learned by chance that her real parents were Jacques and Lotka de Prévaux. Here, she pulls together what pieces of their lives she can, a task made all the more difficult as her father’s profoundly religious family had disowned him when he divorced his wife to marry Lotka, a Jewish woman from Poland whose family died in the camps. But her picture is fairly complete and sparklingly written. Jacques was an airship pilot and a naval officer in the French navy—an admiral, at that—a womanizer equally content in his youth to be playing Chopin on the piano or reclining in an opium den when he was stationed in the Far East. Yung-de Prévaux cuts her father a good deal of slack (of his wandering ways during his first marriage: “Jacques led an extensive and complicated love life, not through libertinage but from the need to exercise his powers of seduction”), but he emerges as a flawed if alluring character deeply involved in what was a remarkable moment in history. Lotka made her way to Paris from southern Poland, became a fashion model, and moved with a fast, artistic crowd. They met, sparks flew, he divorced, his family withdrew, and they married. Shortly thereafter, war broke out in France, and the Prévauxs joined the F2 branch of the Resistance, operating in the south of the country: she as a courier and he in intelligence. They were captured late in the war, tortured but revealed nothing, and shot days before the liberation of Lyon.
A moving story of characters, arresting to begin with, who rise to acts of extreme courage.Pub Date: April 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0194-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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