by Irris Makler ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 25, 2014
Makler’s memoir offers a close-up view of life in a volatile region and the pressures and risks of her daring profession.
The perils and pleasures of daily life in Israel.
In 2002, freelance journalist Makler (Our Woman in Kabul, 2003), “always chasing work,” moved from Moscow to Jerusalem. Palestine’s Second Intifada was inciting violent unrest, with suicide attacks and bombings occurring daily. “The city was literally exploding,” Makler writes. “Israeli media was fizzing.” At the urging of a friend, a BBC foreign correspondent, the author decided to stay in Israel. Within a few months, besides constant reporting, she fell in love with a young musician and actor, and the couple adopted an endearing, energetic dog, Mia. Throughout the narrative, Makler weaves the personal and political: tense border crossings and shopping at IKEA; observing political negotiations and negotiating her relationship with her boyfriend; chasing suicide bombings and chasing Mia. Besides lengthy recountings of Mia’s antics and adventures, Makler portrays a reality of living with constant threats—e.g., a friend out buying pizza was one store away from a devastating bombing in a cafe; if he had gone in for coffee, he would have been blown up. Makler herself was hit during a stone-throwing rampage; her jaw was broken, but if she had turned a fraction of an inch, she would have been blinded or killed. She was always on call, always ready to travel. In the summer of 2005, for example, she took a long, arduous trip to the desert to report on Israel’s fraught withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, an action passionately resisted by some settlers who insisted they would leave only by force. After soldiers calmly completed the evacuation, they complied with Palestinian demands to raze the town, and Makler witnessed the bulldozing of every building, including synagogues. “It was a strange, painful sight,” she writes, “given Jewish history in Europe, to watch Jews destroying synagogues” and unearthing Jewish graves.
Makler’s memoir offers a close-up view of life in a volatile region and the pressures and risks of her daring profession.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7322-9416-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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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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