by J.B. Pontalis & translated by Anne Quinney ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 22, 2003
The introduction sums it up: “It reads as if it were written first and foremost for the author himself and only secondarily...
A French psychoanalyst takes a decidedly literary approach to the classification of different terms used in his profession.
A man of letters as well as of science, Pontalis wrote for Sartre’s journal Les Temps Modernes in the 1950s and ’60s, then founded La Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse and edited it through the early ’80s. Ultimately, however, he is best known for his collaboration with Jean Laplanche, The Language of Psychoanalysis. Published in 1967 and still in print in the US, the book was, translator Quinney notes, “the first full-scale systematic reference guide to psychoanalytic terminology.” Pontalis has also published a trio of novels in France that draw on his experience as an analyst. This time out, however, he has endeavored neither to list a systematic terminology of mental quirks and problems nor to fictionalize neuroses. Instead he provides an uneasy mishmash of memoir, diary, and musing in a slim volume of short entries each headed by a word or phrase that could apply in either the analytic or business side of his practice. (“The Sleeper,” “Dreaming Thought,” “They Stole My Concept!”) Insouciant ease and lighthearted carelessness are the dominant moods, even when Pontalis grouses about his odd irritation with insomniacs (“everything becomes a worry to them”) or wonders whether it is better to lie the patient down or sit face-to-face. In a sense mocking the very idea that such things could ever be reduced to encyclopedia-style entries, Pontalis’s prose flows freely and musically, wandering across the page with no particular place to go and no reason to get there. As such, it seems more like a pillow book of midnight scratchings.
The introduction sums it up: “It reads as if it were written first and foremost for the author himself and only secondarily for his readers.”Pub Date: April 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-8032-3734-0
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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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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