by Denise Chong ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2000
Simply told, with a delicate political balance for the most part carefully managed, the story of the girl in the photograph...
The tale of the girl, Kim Phuc, who survived the napalm burns (the result of "friendly fire") that sent her fleeing in terror and pain into history.
Via interviews, documents, and published reports, Chong (The Concubine's Children, 1995) reconstitutes the life of Kim Phuc in the context of her family and her war-torn, economically stricken country. That Kim, as she now calls herself, did not die from her wounds is virtually a miracle; she was raced to a hospital by the photographer, Nick Ut, who took the picture. The middle of nine children and in frequent pain from the scars and consequences of her burns, Kim survived near-starvation and the primitive living conditions forced on her once prosperous family by war and politics and even managed to qualify for medical school. It was her mother Nu's noodle shop that kept the family going, its ups and downs the stuff of mythology as it follows the course of war, peace, and vindictive bureaucracy. Kim was rediscovered by the international press and used by the now-Communist Vietnam regime as a propaganda tool. Befriended by prime minister Pham Van Dong, successor to Ho Chi Minh, she eventually persuaded the government to send her to Cuba to study. In Cuba, she met her future husband, and together they defected to the West. Today, she lives with her husband, two children, and her parents in Toronto and travels frequently to speak on behalf of world peace.
Simply told, with a delicate political balance for the most part carefully managed, the story of the girl in the photograph is one of horror, survival, and hope—a primer if not the definitive text for those trying to understand the Vietnam war. (b&w photos)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88040-X
Page Count: 373
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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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SEEN & HEARD
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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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