by Edward Seidensticker ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2001
Japanese scholars will devour this testament by one of their own. Others may find it a half-readable curiosity.
A professor’s love affair with Japan and its language.
Seidensticker (Tokyo Rising, 1990, etc.) traces the origin of his lifelong engagement with Japanese culture to a crucial decision taken during WWII. Just graduated from the University of Colorado, he at all costs wanted to avoid being an Army grunt. So he joined the Navy’s Japanese language school instead and became a Marine, carrying books and dictionaries in his rucksack during the invasion of Iwo Jima. From there he moved on to Japan and stayed for years. Seidensticker is not a flashy or emotional writer. He states explicitly that this is not a personal history per se but rather a memoir about his connection to things Japanese over the course of his life. The resulting quirky tone can frustrate with its elusiveness, but on occasion it offers delightful, well-timed insights, as when a flat discussion of a boring but esteemed teacher ends with the author realizing that everyone else in the class is as bored and miserable as he is. Seidensticker also conveys a wonderfully unadulterated sense of place. He clearly loves his native Colorado, whose mountains are described with a gusto he never voices with regard to the natural attractions of Japan. There, his energy is devoted to loving characterizations of people, especially the writers he’s translated: Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima, and Jun’ichiro Tanizaki. Unfortunately, passages featuring these writers often become bogged down in turgid discussions of the Cold War’s influence on Japanese intellectual life. Although those familiar with the intrigues fostered by the Congress for Cultural Freedom will find new material here, in that Seidensticker is concerned with Asia, lay readers will be confused, and in hindsight, Congress seems a tempest in a teapot not worth the space it gets.
Japanese scholars will devour this testament by one of their own. Others may find it a half-readable curiosity.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-295-98134-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Washington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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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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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