An altogether fine account of a life spent doing good—and, ultimately, evil.
“To die for your ideas is the most radical of fairy tales”: thus the moral of this evocative portrait by the son and heir of Italian publisher and political activist Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.
Feltrinelli père died in 1972 near Milan while apparently trying to blow up a power pylon, an act of disruption in the near-trademark style of his newfound friends in the Red Brigades. He had lived a fairy-tale life, indeed: the heir to a lumber fortune won in the waning days of the Habsburg Empire, Feltrinelli enjoyed every privilege, was pampered by doting relatives—including a mother who was fond of shooting deer from the rear window of her Rolls-Royce—and was groomed to bring even greater fortune to his family. Whereas Giangiacomo’s father was friendly with the fascist regime (if sometimes critical of “Mussolini and his gang of toadies”), Giangiacomo joined the Communist resistance during WWII and emerged in the postwar era as one of Italy’s most capable political organizers. With the blessing of the Communist Party, he founded the publishing imprint that today bears his name, issuing a list of paperbacks that formed a syllabus for would-be radicals; the first titles he published, in 1955, were Bertrand Russell’s The Scourge of the Swastika and Jawaharlal Nehru’s Autobiography. Soon thereafter he acquired rights to Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which would likely never have seen print without Feltrinelli’s efforts; Carlo Feltrinelli’s account of the tangled history of the great novel’s publication is among the best there is and will be of great interest to students of dissident literature. The son writes with affection for his father, though he is at a loss to understand how Feltrinelli evolved from more or less orthodox Communist into terrorist, even while refusing to give up his yachts and nice cars and other perquisites of wealth.
An altogether fine account of a life spent doing good—and, ultimately, evil.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-15-100558-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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