A warm, appealing eyewitness account that displays the author’s appreciation for Japan’s art and architecture and its...
In this debut memoir, a Midwesterner recalls teaching English 60 years ago in Japan as part of a pioneering exchange program.
Jorgensen has had a distinguished career, including serving as national director of the United States Department of Education’s Teacher Corps/Peace Corps program. Born in 1925 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, he was a typical Midwestern boy who never dreamed of becoming a world traveler until 1954, when he learned of a program aimed at sending “young representative Americans” (all four were white and male, as Jorgensen notes) to teach English and promote democracy in Japan. Jorgensen jumped at the chance. He was at first dismayed that his teaching assignment would be in Hiroshima, only nine years after the atomic bomb; Jorgensen was welcomed with great hospitality, but “it was simply impossible to go anywhere in Hiroshima, or meet anyone, without being reminded of the A-bomb,” he writes. His students were focused on the future and eager to learn, and he connected with them through informal socializing as well as classroom lessons, discussions of American and Japanese literature and popular music, and other techniques, which proved effective. “I might even have come into my own as a teacher of English,” he wrote to his family near the end of his stay. The memoir offers interest as a piece of historical travel writing, though it can get bogged down in guidebook details. It’s also valuable as an account of pre–Peace Corps intercultural education efforts. Teaching in mid-’50s Hiroshima is the memoir’s strongest theme, and these sections are intriguing indeed—but getting there takes nearly half the book. Much space is devoted to Jorgensen’s friends and mentors, whom few readers except those with a personal connection to them, or scholarly interest in the time or place, will likely take much interest in (although Jorgensen did meet some luminaries, such as Nobel Prize–winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata). A glossary would have been helpful, along with more consistency about Japanese names (for example, Yukio Mishima on one page; Mishima Yukio on another).
A warm, appealing eyewitness account that displays the author’s appreciation for Japan’s art and architecture and its postwar challenges.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9965639-0-1
Page Count: 278
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
