Pantaeva, an Eskimo raised in Siberia who quickly shot from being a little girl with big dreams to a young woman with an international modeling career, spins a fantastic biographical saga out of an impressive store of encounters. From serving tea to the Dalai Lama in Russia to flopping down the streets of Manhattan in a pair of sneakers borrowed from fashion photographer Irving Penn, Pantaeva has made an adventure-filled trip to superstardom. Spurred through an arduous early life in a poor Siberian city by a strong sense of her own potential, a supportive family, and an uncanny ability to be in the right place at the right time, Pantaeva colorfully sketches a mystical account of her journey to success. The story is intriguing partly because she deals with the themes that shaped her identity—her Buryat Eskimo heritage, her belief in the power of fate—instead of bragging about the glamour of the camera or complaining about the hardships of her formative years. There are, however, two faults that detract from the overall presentation. First, events are often jumbled and disjointedly strung together, making it difficult for readers to discern the exact location or the date of an episode. Second, Pantaeva frequently substitutes understanding gained through hindsight for her original unfiltered experiences; for example, when she describes her early childhood, she expresses a deeper understanding of events than it’s believable that a three-year-old could have. But once Pantaeva’s ability to express herself catches up with her predilection for finding tremendous importance in the smallest gestures, this discontinuity disappears. Pantaeva’s vignettes possess an appealingly improvisational quality that conveys how tenuously connected episodes can eventually congeal into a recognizable theme. Though technically an autobiography, Siberian Dream reads more like an intriguing fairy tale.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-380-97554-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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