by Lisa St. Aubin de Terán ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2003
Superior travel writing, but the personal details only tantalizingly hint at tales that bear further telling.
A British novelist and memoirist (The Hacienda, 1998, etc.) evokes the distant places she’s liked best, vividly celebrating journeys in countries from Brazil to Mali.
Though St. Aubin de Terán often mentions in passing parents, sibling, husbands, and children, they are merely brief reference points on the “memory maps” she draws. These maps are intended not only to evoke place, but to detail the lessons learned there. The author confesses that a certain restlessness has impelled her to travel, driving her to places where the life and the people are different. Youngest daughter of a much-married Englishwoman and a West Indian novelist, she was raised by her mother in a drab London suburb. At 16 she married a schizophrenic Venezuelan and spent seven years managing his plantation in the Andean foothills. Subsequently, she restored a villa with her third husband in Italy, lived on the Caribbean island of Nevis for a restorative six months, and rode remote Brazilian railroads for the BBC. She opens with a defining childhood moment—the discovery in the middle of Wimbledon common of a shimmering bog—that taught her the power of communing with a place. In separate chapters, she introduces places that have similarly affected her: Kew Gardens, where her mother taught her about plants (she later became a passionate gardener); the Clapham Railway Museum, “an Aladdin's cave of locomotion” that fueled her delight in train travel; Patagonia, where at a troubled point in her life she founds the winds calming; and Mali, where she felt she truly belonged. St. Aubin de Terán is one of those rare travelers who appreciates the local color but also perceptively notes such troubling elements as obnoxiously racist English wives in Hong Kong, prostitutes in Thailand, and glue-sniffing children in São Paulo.
Superior travel writing, but the personal details only tantalizingly hint at tales that bear further telling.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2003
ISBN: 1-86049-931-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Virago/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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