A gripping account of life in captivity and humankind’s ongoing relationship to war.
Syria’s bloody civil war swallows up an intrepid French-American photojournalist secretly struggling with his own ambivalence about the seductive nature of conflict and violence.
In 2013, at various points in his 81 days of captivity at the hands of a ragtag force bent on toppling President Bashar al-Assad, Alpeyrie alternately found himself fantasizing about fighting his kidnappers and dashing for the hills at the earliest possible opportunity. There were also those times when he longed for the chance to sit and watch Arab variety shows with his tormenters. That the author wound up on Facebook at the conclusion of his punishing ordeal, curious about the welfare of the same gunmen who terrorized him for almost three month highlights the depths of inner turmoil roiling inside the veteran photographer. It was Stockholm syndrome coupled with a journalist’s heightened ability to recognize all angles of an evolving story. Alpeyrie’s often harrowing biographical tale is split between his time in Syrian captivity and his life immediately after a hefty ransom was paid for his release. Like many who have come before him, the author’s dance with death left him yearning for even more dangerous adventures. Readers hoping for special insight into the geopolitical issues involved in the Syrian War will come away disappointed, as Alpeyrie views the ongoing carnage in the Middle East as a sort of inscrutable mess. “From a wide-angle perspective,” he writes, “this whole Syrian War struck me as a historical clusterfuck that could even help set off some global Armageddon.” What the author does offer is a chilling tale about how he managed to win the fragile esteem of his captors while simultaneously keeping his fried nerves from completely shorting out, as well as his personal take on armed conflict and global jihad.
A gripping account of life in captivity and humankind’s ongoing relationship to war.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4650-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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
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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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