by John von Sothen ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 7, 2019
A witty, incisive portrait of contemporary France.
An American in Paris reflects on fantasy and reality.
When journalist von Sothen moved to Paris with his pregnant French actress wife, he counted on staying only a few years in the legendary city of beauty and sophistication. Now, 15 years later, he makes his book debut with a deft, shrewd, and entertaining take on his adoptive home, a place far different from how it is conveyed in winsome movies like Amelie and books like Peter Mayle’s sun-dappled A Year in Provence. Living in the multiethnic, economically diverse 10th arrondissement, von Sothen has observed at close hand homelessness, vagrancy, crime, and the plight of undocumented immigrants and refugees. Yet his Parisian community has felt safe, without the “palpable aggressiveness” that he sensed on his visits to America. In France, social programs provide for free or subsidized child care; free health care, including a doctor who will come to your home 24 hours a day; a good local public school; and laws that ensure affordable housing even in areas that are being gentrified. Although in some Parisian neighborhoods “streets were cleaner and ruined lives were less in your face,” the author prefers the gritty 10th to posh arrondissements that he once assumed were “the embodiment of French wonderfulness.” He skewers some of the customs that also once seemed enviable: long, frequent vacations and long, highly choreographed dinner parties. Every six weeks, schools have two-week breaks, during which working parents sign their children up for some extracurricular activity that will occupy them—or else depend on grandparents, “flown in like the Army corps of engineers,” to supervise. The summer break requires “planning as early as Christmas time” and vacationing—sometimes awkwardly—“en groupe” with assorted other couples. The presidential race between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen gives the author a chance to ring in on the “disenchantment and disillusionment” of French voters, who, he reports with admiration, “in the end, found their true north.”
A witty, incisive portrait of contemporary France.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-2483-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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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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