Williams’ work ably demonstrates how a single person can make a great difference.
A crusader for the worldwide ban on landmines tells her amazing, unlikely journey to winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.
Out of a regular Everywoman’s life, Vermont native Williams emerged as an effective activist, both in working for the democratic movement in Central America during the 1980s and spearheading the international push for the ban on landmines in the ’90s. The author’s early years were marked by her father’s struggles to find steady work as a salesman and her older brother Steve’s deafness and undiagnosed mental illness. Steve grew increasingly violent and eventually had to be hospitalized, a source of guilt and sadness for Williams. Nonetheless, she managed to get through the University of Vermont during the turbulent late-1960s, and she became increasingly drawn to social upheaval, like the debates over the Vietnam War and racism. Teaching English in Mexico opened her eyes to the enormous disparity in wealth between the rich and poor. After relocating to Washington, D.C., she began to raise awareness about the harmful U.S. intervention in the politics of El Salvador and Nicaragua. From an unhappy stint at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, with a focus on Latin America, she longed to get into the trenches and help people, not just theorize about them. In 1991, humanitarian leaders and veterans tapped Williams to build a political movement to ban landmines, which were an active peril in places like Cambodia long after the wars were over. Galvanizing the help of NGOs around the globe and leaders like Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, she organized the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, meeting with officials and speaking at international conferences, all of which culminated in a Mine Ban Treaty hammered out in 1996.
Williams’ work ably demonstrates how a single person can make a great difference.Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-520-27025-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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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