by Curtis Cate ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1997
A highly readable biography that endeavors to correct, but not erase, the image of Malraux as a heroic, committed activist/intellectual. Malraux's youthful ``archaeological'' expedition to Cambodia, his anticolonial activities in Vietnam and China, his service with the Republican Air Force during the Spanish Civil War, his acclaimed novels, his underground activities for the French Resistance, and his postwar political career as de Gaulle's minister of culture—all would seem to suggest a uniquely romantic and large-scale life. Cate, to his credit, tries not to swallow unreservedly the conventional version promulgated by Malraux and his friends. For instance, the 22-year-old Malraux's expedition to Cambodia was largely, it turns out, an attempt to loot temple statuary. Cate (George Sand, 1975, etc.) gives a detailed, colorful, and slightly skeptical account of the unscrupulous venture. This episode might seem an unusual prelude to the anticolonial journalism Malraux began writing soon after, or to his radical fictionalization of the 1925 Cantonese insurrection in The Conquerors. But as Cate shows, such about-faces were a part of Malraux's character: His need for danger, risk, and adventure mingled with his desire to champion causes and to live life on a heroic scale. Cate's reading of Malraux's character seems persuasive when applied to many of his labors, including his efforts on behalf of the French Communist Party and his activities during the Spanish Civil War. His account of Malraux's life in the Resistance, working for both British intelligence and the French maquis, is the book's high point, providing fresh details and a thrilling narrative. The biography levels off afterward, but so did Malraux's political and intellectual drive, though his personality remained enthralling and enigmatic right up to his death in 1976. The real Malraux remains inextricably tied up with the legend, and somewhat obscured by it. Cate provides a rich account of both. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-88064-171-1
Page Count: 480
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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