A lively, chatty exploration of a life that veered in many intriguing directions.
The biography of a little-known figure who escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager and, after a colorful series of careers, went to work as a cataloger for the Library of Congress for two decades.
The first book by fellow librarian Stewart takes advantage of Ruth Rappaport's (1923-2010) voluminous diaries and letters as well as an oral history recorded a few weeks before her death, all now stored at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In 1938, then 15-year-old Rappaport, “a diligent, intense, bespectacled bookworm who questioned everyone and everything,” boarded a train for a visit from her home in Leipzig to Zurich and then refused to go back with the mother who, like her father, would later die in a concentration camp. In Zurich, she was taken in by a series of foster families, one of which complained that she was “spoiled and self-important,” while she waited to get a visa to the United States. A year later, she moved in with her wealthy aunt and uncle in Seattle, where she continued a heavy involvement with the Zionist movement that she had begun back in Germany. After years of dropping into and out of college and working for various papers in Israel, Paris, and New York, she settled on librarianship as a career. In Saigon during the Vietnam War, she was responsible for establishing a network of libraries for those in all of the armed forces. Then, from 1971 to 1993, she worked as a cataloger at the Library of Congress, where her first job was to recatalog a collection that included “pornography, erotica, race-track guides and other items confiscated by the FBI.” Stewart is frank about Rappaport's prickly personality, her tendency to carry on with married men, and the idealism that led her to abandon one project or person after another. Those details, coupled with more admirable qualities like curiosity and drive, serve to make her an entertaining presence.
A lively, chatty exploration of a life that veered in many intriguing directions.Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5039-0415-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
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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