by Christian Picciolini ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 25, 2020
An inspirational and refreshing book for anyone seeking to get out of their cycle of hatred and anger.
A former white supremacist leader examines the sinister nature of organized hate-fueled violence.
“The delicate fibers of America’s fabric have been ripped to shreds by extremism,” writes Picciolini, who recounted his personal transformation in White American Youth (2017). His road to reform informs his latest book, which is partly autobiographical yet also drawn from the profiles of people who have fallen prey to the same net of hate and radical racism that had ensnared him as a teenager. In 1987, Picciolini, who felt lost as a young teenager, immersed himself in the neo-Nazi white supremacy movement and helped found two white supremacist punk bands. He openly confesses that once he met and engaged with the actual objects of his hate and rage, he couldn’t justify or reconcile that hate any longer and denounced the movement. This lesson is just one of several approaches the author believes are proven deterrents against indoctrination with radical extremist groups. The author explores the ways violence integrates itself into personal histories of bigotry or intolerance and calls out racists by exposing their “protective armor” of agony, shame, fear, and insecurity, beneath which lies a “fractured human.” Delving deeper, Picciolini chronicles the evolution of several former extremists he has counselled—e.g., Kassandra, a former white nationalist kidnapped and radicalized by her virtual “online Nazi boyfriend,” a case that became one of the most challenging the author ever faced. He also tells the stories of Daniel, a child born into poverty and emotional abuse, and several post-combat, trauma-addled military veterans who fell “into the insidious arms of hate.” As an outspoken advocate who has denounced racism and resolved to “repair the harm I once caused,” Picciolini sets an instructive example for those questioning their own extremism. As he notes, “this book is my testament to how important empathy, compassion, and self-reflection are.”
An inspirational and refreshing book for anyone seeking to get out of their cycle of hatred and anger.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-52293-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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