An account that will likely satisfy those with republican sympathies. A truly objective take on the Troubles and the...
A partial, partisan view of the process by which Northern Ireland’s warring factions were brought to conference in the mid-1990s, a process that yielded the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.
Adams, the longtime leader of the republican Sinn Féin party, was a key player in those negotiations—and, he is understandably reluctant to say, in the sectarian violence that made those peace talks so desirable. His memoir, certainly of interest to all who have followed the tortuous, bloody course of Northern Irish politics since the 1960s, offers numerous villains for consideration: radical unionists, who favored keeping Northern Ireland a part of the UK; the Royal Ulster Constabulary, given to spraying Catholic neighborhoods with machine-gun fire; and especially the British government, and even more especially the administration of Margaret Thatcher. (“When ten men died in the H-Blocks” following hunger strikes in the early 1980s, Adams insists in a typical turn of rhetoric, “Margaret Thatcher and her regime were seen to be the criminals.”) These three forces, Adams writes, were responsible for introducing an early campaign of “ethnic cleansing” in Northern Ireland by forcing the relocation of hundreds of Catholic families in 1969, which quickened the pace of violence and retaliation; all three behaved badly since, reluctant to give up the gun and truncheon. On the other side, the Irish Republican Army (of which Sinn Féin is the legal, political wing) committed its share of atrocities, too, and while Adams doesn’t much like to talk about such things, he does admit IRA responsibility for the Enniskillen bombing of 1987, when 11 civilians died: “My response,” Adams writes, “was that what the IRA did was wrong. The people who had gathered there were victims of an IRA action which should not have happened.” Finally weary of the bloodshed, the warring parties agreed to negotiations in the mid-1990s, a process moved forward by intervention from a farther shore indeed—namely, Irish-American politicians and Bill Clinton, who took a strong interest in brokering a peace that has yet to be fully realized.
An account that will likely satisfy those with republican sympathies. A truly objective take on the Troubles and the peacemaking process will probably have to be written by a Martian.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50815-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2003
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
© 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
