Not as seasoned as Anne Garrels’s similarly structured Naked in Baghdad (2003), but with some good moments.
A tentative, slight memoir of a sojourn in hell.
Jackie Spinner had a decade’s experience as a Washington Post reporter when she snagged an assignment in Iraq, but by her account she was still green; one editor, she remembers, told her in so many words that she “wasn’t good enough to tackle a story that would require narrative writing.” Readers might be forgiven for thinking as much of the opening chapters, which focus without much depth on the usual helmet-and-rations stuff and offer self-important nostrums (“I went to Iraq because I am a journalist: we drive into hurricanes, not away from them”; “The key to good beat reporting—and I considered the Abu Ghraib story my beat—is to cull sources”). There is little crying, true, but also much complaining about such things as the absence of vegetarian refried beans and the unpleasantness of hearing mortars at all hours—an occupational hazard, one assumes, for anyone who ventures into a war zone. Alternately breezy and world-weary, the narrative gathers strength and speed when Spinner begins to take notice of the world beyond her laptop screen. Apparently generous by nature, she befriends a psychically damaged young Iraqi woman, one of Uday Hussein’s manifold rape victims, who later commits suicide at an American military base (or does she?). Spinner is quick to feed hungry GIs and to bake cookies for her colleagues, who have had to endure the ministrations of a former Saddam-regime chef who is lucky the dictator never ate her cooking. And she takes daring measures to cover the story, not quite fearlessly but bravely all the same. These make for the story’s strongest turns, complemented by her sister Jenny’s reflections on Jackie’s story as she received it in phone calls and emails—and, memorably, in one emotionally fraught visit.
Not as seasoned as Anne Garrels’s similarly structured Naked in Baghdad (2003), but with some good moments.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8853-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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