Two young boys abducted by their father, their mother unable to visit or telephone, the courts delaying custody or visitation decisions as years pass—it’s a horror story. With divorce rates remaining high, tales such as this one grow more common. Separated from her husband, the author lived with her sons in England, their father in Germany. The two boys visited him regularly during school holidays, and Meyer gloried in the idea that her sons would be Euro-children, fluent in three languages (English, French, German) and comfortable on or off the Continent. In the summer of 1994, the boys headed for a scheduled vacation with their father and never returned. They live today in Germany with him and his extended family, who used the authority of local courts to override international agreements regarding abducted children. Why? The boys were discriminated against in England and taunted as “Nazi,” the relatives charged; they also claimed that while Meyer worked she left her sons in the care of strangers. She disproved all the accusations, but not to the satisfaction of Germany’s courts, which give weight to children’s preferences. Meyer’s sons, although only nine and seven years old, “expressed a strong desire” to be German—Meyer believes because they had been manipulated by their father and taught to hate her. When her German and English lawyers could do no more, she pursued her case in the British Parliament, the French Cabinet, and finally through the media in England and France, where a version of this book first appeared. She also joined international activist groups like the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Now married to the British ambassador to the US, she is able to speak to her children by telephone occasionally but has not been allowed to visit. A somewhat hysterical tone weakens Meyer’s arguments, but overall this is an eye-opener regarding the international swamp that can turn Euro-parents into bureaucratic victims. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen.
Pub Date: May 7, 1999
ISBN: 1-891620-15-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
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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