An engaging biography, coupled with an equally captivating national history.
An homage to debut author Sipe’s mother, who survived struggles in Poland during World War II.
After the author’s mother, Stanis?awa Emilia “Emma” Krasowska Serbinski, suffered a stroke in 2007, Sipe found two boxes of memorabilia in the attic of her mother’s home in Pennsylvania, which contained hundreds of letters. The correspondence, which began in 1941, was written in Polish, so the author had to enlist the help of a translator to decipher it. She was born in the early 1920s in Kosów Huculski, Poland (now Kosiv, Ukraine), and enjoyed a happy childhood. In 1939, when she was 19, she met Zdzislaw Eugeniusz Serbinski, the man she’d eventually marry, and she had designs on going to college. But that same year, everything changed: Adolf Hitler ordered the German invasion of Poland, and Josef Stalin began the Soviet invasion less than three weeks later. Sipe grippingly recreates her mother’s ordeal, telling of how Emma participated in the underground resistance and helped to smuggle Polish soldiers out of the country, among other tasks. For this, she was arrested by the Soviets and sentenced to eight years of toil in a labor camp. In 1941, the Sikorski-Mayski agreement provided amnesty for Polish prisoners, and both Emma and Zdzislaw made their way to Bukhara to join Ander’s Army, a new Polish military within the Soviet-controlled territory. She was eventually sent to Iran to train as a nurse, reunited with Zdzislaw in Iraq in 1943, and married him the same year in Palestine. The author presents Emma’s life as cinematically dramatic as she lives through both world wars, and through Poland’s brief independence between them. Sipe’s meticulous research is impressive, as she also furnishes a concise but thorough history of Poland’s travails and a moving account of her reflections on her own connection to Poland: “I have grown from being a reluctant Pole, to a person who is proud of her heritage.” Her prose is unfailingly clear and engrossing, and she fills the book with beautiful personal and historical black-and-white photographs.
An engaging biography, coupled with an equally captivating national history.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5043-9653-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2018
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
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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