Balanced, but in the end, it’s impossible not to be moved by the conviction of Sands and his comrades.
A moment-by-moment chronicle of the Irish revolutionary’s political education in Gulag Belfast.
While sympathetic to Sands (1954–81), O’Hearn is frank about the controversial, often violent IRA actions in which the man participated. The biography’s main aim, writes O’Hearn (Sociology/Queen’s College, Belfast), is “to tell who Bobby Sands was and how he related to and was shaped by his time and place.” A product of the tumultuous ’60s in Ireland, the boy experienced the worst of the British colonial occupation. His family was driven from their home, and Sands was beaten and stabbed by Loyalist gangs simply for being a Catholic. He enlisted as an IRA volunteer, carrying out robberies that he justified as fundraising efforts. By the time Sands entered the Belfast prison system, he was one of the “political animals” at the most committed end of the spectrum of IRA detainees. Yet his ideas were still unformed, and jail became the place where he could think and read—everything from poetry to black humor, Che Guevara to Franz Fanon—as he sought for ways to encourage grassroots democracy and resistance to British rule. Jail also became a theater for symbolic expression: IRA members considered themselves political prisoners and would not accede to any procedure that labeled them criminals. They refused to wear prison clothing and resisted restrictions on their right to associate or to receive visits from friends and family. If it would force the authorities to recognize their political status, they were willing to die, and they did: Sands and nine others perished during a hunger strike in Belfast’s dreaded H-Block cells. The first to die, he became an international symbol of resistance yet remained a cipher. Who was he, and how had he come to give his life for the cause? Few knew, because Sands was incarcerated for most of that short life; O’Hearn’s account fills in many gaps.
Balanced, but in the end, it’s impossible not to be moved by the conviction of Sands and his comrades.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-56025-842-X
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Nation Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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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