Both the incisiveness and the perspective—of a civilian professor and the military students she loves and mourns—enrich...
A singular mix of literary criticism and memoir from a West Point English professor who helps plebes mold the mindset that prepares future officers for war.
Samet (Soldier's Heart: Reading Literature Through Peace and War at West Point, 2007) began teaching the freshman literature course at West Point in 1997 and considers this “the most important trust I have been given in my professional life.” Throughout this book, she mediates between the universality of great literature—and popular culture in general—and the specific psychic demands placed on the military, not only in combat, but in re-entry to civilian life. In the process, she encompasses everything from the Odyssey and Shakespeare to War and Peace to Catch-22 (which she initially loved but found harder to read the more experience she had with former students dying in battle), with side excursions into baseball, boxing and motorcycle gangs. She explains how the latter arose in the aftermath of World War II, from vets who had difficulty adjusting to the routines of domesticity. She quotes one former student–turned-biker on the sensation of “being in control and out of control simultaneously. On the very razor’s edge….It’s that same…feeling that follows you everywhere in a combat zone.” The title refers to, among other things, the transition by soldiers coming home who have yet to leave the war behind—“a terrain that seems as strange as it ever was: a no man’s land peopled by ghosts yet by the living, too. War vertigo is the order of the day….” This is a book about narrative, about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives, about the revisions we make when those stories no longer cohere, about endings that don’t provide resolution, let alone the cliché of closure.
Both the incisiveness and the perspective—of a civilian professor and the military students she loves and mourns—enrich readers’ appreciation for the psychological complexities of war and its aftermath.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-22277-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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