A puzzle. (8-page b&w photo insert, not seen)
An uneven memoir by the mother of Amadou Diallo, the young man who, in 1999, was shot 41 times by New York City police officers outside his apartment building.
Kadiatou Diallo was born in 1959 in Guinea. Although her family was Muslim, she was allowed to go to school and to study the Koran. At age 13, she was married to Saikou Diallo, a 29-year-old entrepreneur/trader, who already had one wife. They moved to Liberia, and, at 16, Kadiatou had her first child, a son she named Amadou. While the marriage experienced rocky moments, Saikou built an impressive import/export business traveling all over Africa, Europe, and Asia. Other children soon followed, and Kadiatou joined Saikou in Togo, then returned to Guinea, finally relocating in Bangkok. The children were educated in private schools, were multilingual, cosmopolitan. By the 1990s, Kadiatou and Saikou had divorced (he had taken a third wife), and she had started her own export business in gems. Amadou decided to study computer science and go to America. The remainder of Amadou’s life is compressed into roughly 40 pages. He takes a job processing computer orders, lives with four other men in a small apartment in the Bronx, and applies for asylum in the US, falsely stating that he’s from Mauritania and escaping persecution. In 1999, Amadou changes jobs to that of street vendor, and after returning home from work one evening, is shot 41 times in his apartment vestibule by undercover police officers. While the title indicates a focus on Amadou, there are so few details composing his life that the reader can’t form a clear picture of him. This is largely about Kadiatou, and yet she, too, remains an enigma. Her motivations are hazy, and the language is often opaque: “Even in the age of advanced untold knowing, I had no idea what was happening.” Not one character is vividly drawn, and the wildly different geographic locations all morph into one.
A puzzle. (8-page b&w photo insert, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45600-9
Page Count: 276
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
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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