A pleasant journey hardly rendered urgent by measured, unemphatic and unspectacular prose.
Shy, stilted debut by Eleni author Nicolas Gage’s daughter, who recounts her efforts in her mid-20s to rebuild the haunted family homestead in Greece.
People magazine beauty editor Gage was living the Greek-American dream in Manhattan when she decided to take up the gauntlet flung by her four thitsas (aunts) and return to the village of Lia, located on a mountain in the remote, impoverished province of Epiros. “There is hate in that village,” declared Thitsa Kanta, a long-time exile in Massachusetts who had nothing but bitter memories of the Greek/Albanian border town racked by a brutal succession of invaders during and after WWII. During the civil war of the late 1940s, Grandmother Eleni helped her entire family escape the Greek communist guerrillas who occupied the village; they joined her husband in America, but she herself was held back, arrested, tortured and executed. After 50 years of disuse, her house was decrepit and filled with evil memories. Nonetheless, young Eleni returned to supervise its reconstruction based on her father’s redesign. She was fluent enough in Greek to do business with the construction crew and make friends with neighbors, friends and sister churchgoers (she observed all the religious festivals). Most of her friends were elderly; they either burst into tears at her resemblance to her grandmother, or wondered why she wasn’t married. Her narrative is a curiously lackadaisical mixture of American earnestness and superficiality. She declares that she learned firsthand the importance of omens to Greeks, for example, from the discovery before her departure of ovarian cysts, which she monitored throughout her trip. When she finally forced herself to read her father’s unsettling account of her grandmother’s ordeal, she had to escape the scary parts by flipping through a Greek Vogue.
A pleasant journey hardly rendered urgent by measured, unemphatic and unspectacular prose.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-34028-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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