by Auma Obama translated by Ross Benjamin ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2012
Another treatment of the extended Obama family that enlightens and deepens the public’s understanding of the president.
A burnished look at a difficult, ruptured childhood in Kenya by the president’s half sister, older by one year.
Unlike David Maraniss’ comprehensive biography of the president (Barack Obama: The Story, 2012), which does not sugarcoat the problematic father the president and Auma shared, this delicate, emotional work sidesteps the patriarch in order to portray a young woman deeply resentful of the sexist treatment of women in her Luo culture and determined to forge her own identity. Auma is the daughter of Barack Obama Sr.’s first wife, Kezia, who was essentially abandoned pregnant with Auma at the family compound while her husband pursued a scholarship program at the University of Hawaii. Much happened while her father went on to graduate studies in economics at Harvard, namely his marriage to Stanley Ann Dunham and the birth of Barack Obama Jr., divorce and remarriage to another young white American woman, Ruth Baker, who then followed Barack back to Nairobi and became the third wife and awkward stepmother to Auma and her older brother, Abongo. Deprived of her biological mother, Auma found in the rigors and routine of her schools a reprieve from a bleak home life that comprised an “oppressive emptiness” resulting from her father’s eventual divorce from Ruth. Her father’s demise, caused by the loss of a government finance job and debilitating car accidents (Auma blames them on political intrigue, Maraniss on his drinking), strained her relationship with him to such an extent that she did not seek his permission to travel as an exchange student in Germany. Auma became a proficient student of German, and her meeting with her brother Barack in Chicago in 1984 marks the brightest moment in this eager-to-please work. The meeting paved the way for his subsequent trips to Kenya and warmly unfolding relationship with his African family.
Another treatment of the extended Obama family that enlightens and deepens the public’s understanding of the president.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-01005-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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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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