In the stormwater’s swirl, Campbell has found a bright and tender leaf to follow, and the effect on readers will be...
A Canadian journalist covering the plight of Iraqis who fled to Syria a decade ago enlists the help of an Iraqi woman in Damascus—friendship and disaster ensue.
In 2007, Campbell (Creative Writing/Univ. of British Columbia), a three-time National Magazine Award winner for foreign correspondence, was working on a major story for Harper’s about Iraqi refugees when she first made contact with Ahlam, an Iraqi woman who served as her “fixer” (one who clears paths for journalists). Their professional relationship soon grew personal, and the author chronicles what went well and what went terribly wrong. Told principally in the first person, Campbell’s story includes not only her stark and frightening experiences in Damascus, but also her fracturing love life back home as well as background on the Iraq War and ensuing civil war and the frangible stability in Syria, the only country to accept large numbers of Iraqi refugees. As she worked on her story, Campbell’s friendship with Ahlam flourished and continued when the author left the country. Then Campbell found out that Ahlam had been arrested. The author, feeling profound guilt (was it because of her?), employed numerous strategies to find out why she was arrested, where she was being held, and what the charges were. Campbell’s text races along—catching readers’ hearts as it goes—and after the arrest, the author includes sections of “Ahlam’s Story,” grim third-person accounts about the experience of prison: deprivation, interrogations, violence, and terror. These sections increase the tension in readers, who have known since the beginning that dark things were on the way. The author sometimes veers a little toward the melodramatic near the ends of chapters, but it’s a small quibble in a powerful book.
In the stormwater’s swirl, Campbell has found a bright and tender leaf to follow, and the effect on readers will be transformative.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-14787-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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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BOOK REVIEW
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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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