Well-written and quite revealing.
Makdisi (Beirut Fragments, 1990) blends feminism and international politics in this examination of the lives and aspirations of the women of her family over roughly the last century.
Born in Jerusalem to Arab Christians, Makdisi was raised by her grandmother Teta and mother to envision and train herself for “a perfect domestic life,” an idea that “was as much a part of our feminine existence as the air we breathed.” When she came of age, she writes, Makdisi and the women of her own generation dismissed the elders: “We thought they lacked strength, or imagination, or gratitude, or willpower, or intellect, or something.” Living through the Lebanese civil war tempered such attitudes, and she embarked on a long project to reconstruct the elders’ lives and times in order to understand just how much strength, and intellect, and imagination they had. Much of Makdisi’s gentle and largely uncomplaining account is a catalogue of disappointments, for the lives of her forebears did not often match their dreams; her father, for instance, had to return to Palestine from his cherished America to satisfy his mother’s deathbed bidding, “but he never really forgave her for deflecting him from what he had seen as his destiny in the New World.” Just so, where she had always thought of Teta as a ghostly, elderly figure shrouded in black who moved silently throughout the house, Makdisi discovers that the Teta of the 1900s was a vivacious, beloved presence independent-minded enough to reject “the festive henna evenings that preceded weddings, especially in Galilee, where she now lived,” a rejection that subtly ties in to Makdisi’s earlier disquisition on why so many young Arabs are now taking the veil—“and many young women, claiming their individual right to do so, are as zealous in this regard as their mothers or grandmothers were in removing it.”
Well-written and quite revealing.Pub Date: April 24, 2006
ISBN: 0-393-06156-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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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