A valuable resource for war-journalism buffs, who can only hope that Stevens’s memoirs will someday be published in full,...
Absorbing but erratic portrait of a charismatic, little-known American who was the longest-serving journalist in the Soviet Union.
Edmund Stevens went to Russia in 1934 to work as a translator and writer for the Communist International’s publishing house; the idealistic American communist wanted to contribute to the Bolshevik cause. Fired during a 1937 Stalinist purge that saw most of the publishing house’s senior officials “repressed,” Stevens turned to journalism and became a correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor in 1939. He solidified the Monitor’s reputation as a leader in war reporting, and he won a Pulitzer in 1950 for his articles on Stalin’s purges. He died in 1992, but Heckler (English and Journalism/Miami Univ. of Ohio; Heart and Soul of the Nation: How the Spirituality of Our First Ladies Changed America, 1997) focuses on the World War II years. Stevens had no formal training as a journalist, she writes, but his uncanny ability to anticipate where the next big story would be took him to the frontlines in small, overlooked nations such as Finland, Norway, Lithuania and Ethiopia. He also boasted a memorable skill in summing up a place or situation with colorful, often humorous details. Documenting the day-to-day impact of the war on both soldiers and ordinary civilians, Heckler notes, Stevens could never maintain a stable home life, frequently abandoning his long-suffering wife to return to the front lines. Regrettably, Heckler’s clunky, distracting choice of format significantly detracts from the journalist’s riveting story. Excerpts from his unpublished memoir are interspersed at random intervals with observations from Heckler and other journalists, with little indication as to whether the material is contemporary or historical. Stevens’s fascinating recollections would have been better served by a series of detailed chapter introductions than by Heckler’s frequent, awkward interruptions.
A valuable resource for war-journalism buffs, who can only hope that Stevens’s memoirs will someday be published in full, unmarred by Heckler’s intrusive editing.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8262-1770-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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