A smartly realized memoir presenting a poignant history of change in Egypt through the story of a man whose strength of...
Amid war and scarcity, a determined young Egyptian pursues an education and creates a new life for his young family in the United States.
The author experienced loss early in life with the sudden departure of his Jewish schoolmates and family friends at the onset of World War II and the conflict over Israeli statehood. A Coptic Christian educated at a British private school in Cairo, the progressive young Anis quietly observed the prejudices of class and faith, from the struggles of his own proud father to the growing momentum of organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood. He pursued his dream of attending medical school, and fell in love with fellow student Nadia. After years of ardent and embarrassing overtures–and while navigating intense feelings of obligation to his overbearing mother–the author proposed to Nadia. Despite hassles by inspectors looking for bribes and the encroaching war over the Suez Canal, the two managed a family and successful careers. Anis writes observantly about his time in Egypt; through peace, occupation and war, he witnessed the politics grow more radical and insular, and he was torn between his loyalties to Egypt and his liberal beliefs. When a bomb destroyed their penthouse apartment, Anis immigrated to London and eventually to the U.S. in order to shield his family from violence. In the U.S., he faced prejudice in his medical-residency programs. After inviting his aging parents to America, he was still unable to stand up to his mother, who took over Nadia’s role in their home. With insight and humility, Anis adeptly renders his frustrations as an immigrant, and his musings on family and the clash of old rituals and changing attitudes are incisive and often moving.
A smartly realized memoir presenting a poignant history of change in Egypt through the story of a man whose strength of character saw him through.Pub Date: Dec. 21, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-40054-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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