For truly capturing the power of dreams and the resilience of human nature, this book deserves a wide audience.
Steinberg (Little Liberia: An African Odyssey in New York City, 2011, etc.) weaves together the many personas of a man whose story is at once unique and an archetypal example of an all-too-large collective.
Asad Abdullahi is many things: refugee, entrepreneur, father, dreamer. In the beginning, though, his identity was simple: a happy child with loving parents living in a city he called his own. That city was Mogadishu, Somalia, and in 1991, Asad's idyllic family life was shattered due to their identity as members of the Daarood tribe. When violence against Daarood men became common, Asad’s father started sleeping away from home to keep the family safe. One morning, he simply didn’t return. Soon after, Asad's mother was murdered by militiamen. As his family and other Daarood refugees fled the violence and eventually their country, Asad was repeatedly separated from those he knew and loved. Upon his eventual arrival in Kenya, the ritual of leaving everything he knew behind became the norm. He created new, nontraditional family units, but he always separated himself from them because, as Steinberg writes, “he is a person with an enormous appetite for risk.” Asad’s adolescent years were marked by a pattern of being taken in and looked after just long enough for him to believe he could improve his life by moving on. So he moved continuously on and sometimes up, carrying the scars of failures and mistakes with him along the way. Steinberg's solid prose is perfect for the task of sharing Asad's history. He probes the darkest moments of his subject’s life without ever becoming maudlin, telling the story starkly and bluntly. He ably demonstrates to readers Asad's absolute refusal to give up while reminding them that, despite his tribulations, in many ways, his path was his own to form.
For truly capturing the power of dreams and the resilience of human nature, this book deserves a wide audience.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-35272-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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