An often engaging perspective into the social and political landscape of revolutionary Ethiopia.
In this debut memoir, an Ethiopian man describes his journey from student to refugee following a revolution.
Growing up with a wealthy, if somewhat reserved, father in rural Ethiopia, Tiruneh was in a good position to receive an education and expand his horizons beyond his small village. As a student of geography with a keen interest in Western movies, it seemed that he would easily achieve his goals—until the region’s political upheaval in the 1970s changed the course of his life. Facing revolt, massacres, and a brutal totalitarian regime, Tiruneh went from student to teacher, and then lived a life in hiding as a socialist rebel. Despite constant harassment by the government he opposed, he successfully fled to New York City to make a new life for himself. In this memoir, Tiruneh uses one of the world’s most troubled political climates of the last 40 years as his backdrop. He writes of fascinating moments from his childhood and early life, from a time he pretended to be sick in order to test his father’s love to his awkward first interaction with a girl. His prose can be somewhat detached, though, as if he’s reporting on events he merely witnessed rather than lived through. However, the compelling details he chooses will give readers a surprisingly clear view of both his character and the complexities of life in Ethiopia. He narrates with certainty and insight, balancing historical facts with firsthand experiences in his family. “The killing of so many innocent people was a puzzle that I could not solve,” he writes of a brutal massacre in Bichena, demonstrating his rational, even-tempered manner, which is often at odds with the chaos and conflict surrounding him. This even temperament sometimes makes the story less suspenseful, particularly while he’s in hiding and struggling to get to the United States. That said, readers interested in the reality of Ethiopia will find him to be an enlightened narrator who paints an authentic, powerful portrait of his native country.
An often engaging perspective into the social and political landscape of revolutionary Ethiopia.Pub Date: April 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497435179
Page Count: 400
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2015
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
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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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