A moving account of a remarkable woman and activist.
The story of a courageous nun who was murdered in 2005 while working for environmental protection and agrarian land reform in Brazil’s Amazon jungle.
Sister Dorothy Stang was “greatly loved and fiercely hated.” In this succinct biography, Le Breton (Trapped: Modern-Day Slavery in the Brazilian Amazon, 2003, etc.), a British journalist who lives in Brazil, investigates the life and death of this modern-day martyr. To understand the nun, she avers, it is first necessary to understand the young woman who entered a convent at age 17 in 1948. Dorothy Mae Stang was one of nine children in a strict Catholic family; her father, an officer at the Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Dayton, Ohio, was devoted to organic farming. In 1966, after working with families in Arizona migrant camps, Sister Dorothy was sent to do missionary work in Brazil. She later asked to serve with the “poorest of the poor” and in 1982 settled in the Nazaré region, site of the controversial Transamazon Highway. She became increasingly committed to agrarian reform, sustainability and environmental activism. She worked as a community organizer with the peasants (“her people”) to claim land even while illegal slash-and-burn campaigns devastated the forest around them. Her enemies were high-powered loggers and landowners, some of whom were ultimately charged with her death. Interweaving Brazilian history and political context throughout, the author makes good use of interviews with priests, nuns, activists, peasants and family members to paint a full portrait of a spirited, blessedly stubborn and highly committed individual. Recounting the grim details of Sister Dorothy’s murder, Le Breton stresses her calmness and resolve when confronted by the hired assassins. Fans of religious biography will be especially inspired by accounts of Sister Dorothy’s devotion to Catholicism; in the moment before her death, she read aloud a passage from the Bible.
A moving account of a remarkable woman and activist.Pub Date: Jan. 22, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52218-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
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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