Indifferently written and burdened by invented dialogue, but notable for illustrating that the meeting of civilizations need...
Biography of a moderate Arab leader in an age of intransigence and empire building.
Freelance biographer and business writer Kiser (The Monks of Tibhirine: Faith, Love, and Terror in Algeria, 2002, etc.) finds a meaty subject in early-19th-century Algeria, when French soldiers invaded the country, ostensibly to deliver it from Ottoman oppressors, only to find that the Algerians rather liked the Ottomans, “whose laissez-faire habits had left the tribes in relative freedom so long as they paid their taxes.” They did not like the liberty, equality, fraternity-spreading French, whom they ambushed in mountain passes and attacked in the city streets. The intellectual author of resistance was a jihadist emir named Abd el-Kader, a marabout (“a holy man or member of a religious brotherhood”) who kept much of the French army pinned down for several years until finally being captured. El-Kader played a gentleman’s game of war, accompanied by religious pronouncements meant for anyone with ears, along the ecumenical lines of, “No one is an infidel in all the ways relating to God.” The French emperor greeted El-Kader as a worthy foe, and arrangements were made to settle him in a grand castle within sight of the Pyrenees, even if some of the locals protested that he was a “monster of the desert.” Still, a prison is a prison, and El-Kader’s many friends in France eventually agitated to have him removed to Ottoman territory, where he became a respected governor and saved thousands of Christians from being killed in religious violence in Syria. As Kiser notes, he was so widely respected that the New York Times editorialized on his death that he was “one of the few great men of the century.”
Indifferently written and burdened by invented dialogue, but notable for illustrating that the meeting of civilizations need not always produce a clash.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9798828-3-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Monkfish
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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