by Huyen Nguyen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 6, 2016
A haunting, cleareyed account of the hardships imposed by war and tyranny.
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Huyen recounts growing up during politically perilous times in Vietnam.
Debut author Huyen was born in 1936 in Cat Ba, North Vietnam. Her father had a prominent position working with the French Vietnamese at a customs house, and her family enjoyed a safe, prosperous life in a palatial home. Her happy world was shattered, however, when the French left and the Japanese invaded, forcing her family from her house. Her father lost his job and was all but bankrupt, and the author gave up her dreams of a good education. Not only did the family suffer from poverty and rootlessness, but also regular bombings from American combat planes. The Japanese occupation eventually ended, but then the Chinese invaded, and the Communists took over. Huyen’s mother sold rice to make ends meet. The family moved to Saigon as part of a program sponsored by the United States, and the author’s mother had her birth certificate falsified so she could work as a tailor. The family was impoverished until a family friend lent them a considerable sum of money in return for Huyen moving to Laos to help her with her business. In Laos, predatory males plagued her; she turned down an offer to become a wealthy man’s mistress, despite the financial boon the arrangement would have been for her family. She was repeatedly assaulted and raped by her employers and impregnated by one of them. Huyen’s remembrance is a heart-rending one of a life upended by geopolitical tumult. Some readers will find her accounts of sexual assault hard to read and her responses to them bewildering. She claims to miss one employer who tried to rape her more than once and “was moved” by the affection of another immediately after he raped her. This remains an affecting tale, nonetheless, told simply and powerfully by a remarkably resilient woman.
A haunting, cleareyed account of the hardships imposed by war and tyranny.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5349-3763-5
Page Count: 140
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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