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MURDERERS AND OTHER FRIENDS

ANOTHER PART OF LIFE

Following Clinging to the Wreckage (1982), a bracing and bounteous second helping of the British barrister/writer's life, works, and many, many opinions. The paramount lesson he learned from his ``second life'' as a Queen's Counsel defending accused criminals in jury trials, Mortimer says, was the value of suspending judgment on people inside the courtroom and out. Don't believe him for a minute. Though he could coolly defend the merits of books like The Return of the Enema Bag Rapist or or the innocence of a youth who claimed the gent he stabbed to death—a man on his way home from dinner with his fiancÇe—had been assaulting his virtue, Mortimer evidently never lost the habit of passing judgment, as the racy tone of each tart anecdote reveals again and again. His career as a playwright brought him together with Tony Richardson, Robert Graves, Laurence Olivier, and David Niven, each of whom hurtles through this memoir in an acid-tipped cameo. And his convictions as an unrepentant socialist and an ``atheist for Christ'' flavor his stinging remarks on Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Michael Heseltine, and the British passion for locking up people in prisons. Not that this passion for judgment extends to constructing a coherent argument on behalf of his own life. As he spends less and less time in the courtroom and more and more at the typewriter, his stream of reminiscences, always sketchy on dates and sequences, becomes, if anything, still more disjointed. Mortimer finds that Rex Harrison will—no, he won't—be playing his father onstage, invents the inimitable Rumpole of the Bailey, and interviews a passionate defender of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, but never forgets to place his own prickly sensitivity and his fine sense of the absurd at center stage. An endearing ragbag of recollections snapping into focus at warp speed. (30 photos, not seen)

Pub Date: March 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-670-84902-2

Page Count: 322

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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