A languid and sensuous exploration of the subcontinent through the eyes of an estranged daughter.
Famous moviemaker’s daughter helps out on troubled film shoot and struggles to find herself.
Saltzman grew up torn between her parents’ worlds. Her Indian mother, the writer/director/producer Deepa Mehta, moved to Canada as a young woman and married a Jewish man, with whom she had Devyani. Eleven years old when they divorced, the author chose to go with her more affectionate father, a decision that forever wounded her loving but distant mother. Saltzman’s memoir covers her experiences helping to shoot Mehta’s most recent film, Water. During this time, the author was not only attempting to find herself but also to reconcile with her mother. (Hindsight suggests that maybe a frenetic film set was not the best place to attempt such a thing.) Shot on location in Benares in 1999, the period drama about Hindu widows turned out to be a provocative affair in a country convulsed in the recent past by mob-fueled ethnic bloodshed. Self-appointed guardians of India’s Hindu heritage were soon resisting Mehta and her crew, which included Saltzman as an untrained third assistant cameraperson; eventually, sets were burned and death threats made. Meanwhile, the author was learning as much as she could about the filmmaking process (her mother seemed to prefer the sink-or-swim method) and trying desperately not to fall in love with a fellow crew member who was oh-so-wrong for her. Later sections follow Saltzman as she studied at Oxford and then reconvened with Water five years later on its new location in strife-torn Sri Lanka. Although the memoir seems intended as an evocation of her relationship with Mehta—the book’s publication coincides with Water’s theatrical release—it’s more successful in conveying the author’s impressions of India. The human figures in this melodrama recede far into the background, overwhelmed by the immensity of the sprawling, beautiful, violent world Saltzman encounters.
A languid and sensuous exploration of the subcontinent through the eyes of an estranged daughter.Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-55704-711-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Newmarket Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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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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