A grim reminder that tyrants have myriad ways to strangle dissent. (8 pp. b&w photos)
A gripping account of the final months of the Russian poet, who took her own life in 1941, at age 49, following the arrest and imprisonment by the Soviet secret police of her daughter, husband, and friends.
“Where is the truth?” asks Kudrova. And: “How true is it?” Newly translated from the Russian, this 1995 work (her third about Tsvetaeva, none reviewed) endeavors to answer these disturbing questions about the famous poet’s decision to hang herself in a small, somber house near Moscow. The author carefully reconstructs Tsvetaeva’s movements and imagines what she might have been feeling as her personal world imploded, the Russia she knew exploded (Nazi bombs were raining on Moscow), and the NKVD rounded up, interrogated, broke, and executed anyone who’d ever breathed, or even considered, an anti-Soviet sentiment. (Readers concerned about our own Patriot Act will recognize some ominous shadows flickering on the wall.) Kudrova begins in mid-June 1939 as the poet and her 14-year-old son were leaving France to return to the Soviet Union. Her husband, who had been working for Soviet intelligence in France, was already home. Husband and wife had not seen each other for 18 months; the NKVD would shoot him in 1941. Using their son’s diary, the KGB archives, letters (including three suicide notes) and other personal documents, interviews, and visits to key locations, Kudrova imagines the forces at work on Tsvetaeva. The author examines and modifies three published motives for the poet’s suicide: protecting her son, who by her death would perhaps be freed from subsequent government suspicion; yielding to mental illness (her mood had grown ever more fearful and saturnine); avoiding arrest herself by the NKVD and being forced to traduce her friends, even as they had falsely betrayed her family. Kudrova concludes by calling Tsvetaeva “another victim of the Great October Socialist Revolution.”
A grim reminder that tyrants have myriad ways to strangle dissent. (8 pp. b&w photos)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-522-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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