More learned than most travelogues, this fond remembrance of both a little girl who suffered for her faith and the people...
A rarity: a literal hagiography, but much more.
Novelist Green (The Dead of the House, 1972) here relates the story of Saint Foy, a young girl betrayed by her father and put to death by Roman authorities for her Christian faith in about A.D. 290. The site of her martyrdom, a village in southwestern France called Conques, has long been an important center of pilgrimage and healing, served by both the warm springs of the Massif Central and a local belief in miracles wrought by the saint’s benevolent spirit. Green relates Foy’s story, with sometimes overwrought emotion, in a poetic narrative that celebrates the young girl’s constancy, a story that will be of great appeal to readers of all beliefs. Perhaps even more importantly, Green (who died in 1996) spent much of the last quarter-century of her life in and around Conques, and she paints a loving portrait of village life in a little-visited part of France—a poor place abandoned by its young and inhabited largely, it seems, by partisan veterans of WWII with a long memory for the injuries inflicted by the Germans and their homegrown collaborators. Green’s cast of characters includes wizened widows, a sardonic village priest, and cigarette-puffing farmers whose language and customs retain an air of the medieval. “The writer who uses ennui in [the local manner] today is committing an archaïsme,” she writes of one turn of phrase. “Yet this is the way the people here talk, and it is only one example of an older French that survives here along with the ancient langue d'oc.”
More learned than most travelogues, this fond remembrance of both a little girl who suffered for her faith and the people who work a stony land today is immensely appealing.Pub Date: July 10, 2000
ISBN: 0-394-56595-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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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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