A respectful, if exhausting, portrait of an influential but marginal proponent of racial rage and third-world nationalism...
A biography of the Caribbean-born French psychiatrist-turned-revolutionary whose angry books (Black Skin White Mask, The Wretched of the Earth) and inflammatory speeches furthered the cause of Algerian independence and African nationalism in the 1950s.
What’s more important, the historical facts of a life or the anything-goes deconstructions of surviving texts? Just the facts, says Macey (The Lives of Michel Foucault, 1994, etc.). In his detailed study of this largely-forgotten figure from the war for Algerian independence (Fanon’s books were posthumous bestsellers only in America, and they became somewhat notorious during the American civil rights movement), Macey shows that Fanon’s shrill exultation of violence as a kind of social diuretic, as well as his explosive, frequently incoherent fulminations over racial bigotry, must be understood in terms of his origins. Born in 1925 into a prosperous middle-class family on Martinique that descended from freed slaves, Fanon aspired to what he thought were the civilized refinements of the white minority until he found this minority supporting the bigoted Vichy regime during WWII. But the Left was just as bad: Fanon spent part of the war at a Moroccan training camp for the Resistance, whose French leaders patronized, cheated, and actively despised black Martinicians and African Muslims. Later, as a psychiatrist practicing in a French Algerian mental hospital, Fanon saw African patients consistently misdiagnosed by doctors who refused to understand their culture, leading him to believe that their insanity was a reaction to French fear and loathing. His sympathies for African nationalists led to his banishment from French Algeria. He then became a tireless spokesman, pamphleteer, and rabble-rouser for Algerian independence and African nationalism until he died from cancer in an American hospital.
A respectful, if exhausting, portrait of an influential but marginal proponent of racial rage and third-world nationalism who did not live long enough to see his principles perverted by current regimes. (8 b&w maps)Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-27550-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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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