An inspirational memoir about youthful idealism and the power of popular culture to challenge the status quo.
The inside story of the Russian rock revolutionaries and the trial and prison ordeals that followed their arrest.
Alyokhina is no more a writer than she is a musician or an “official enemy of the people” of Russia, as she was charged under the Putin administration. She is an artist (whose drawings underscore the droll humor of her perspective), a mother, and, more recently, the recipient of the LennonOno Grant for Peace and the Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought. The slapdash breeziness of this memoir shows the absurdity of Pussy Riot’s imprisonment for subversively performing a protest song in a church. The news of their arrest and the seriousness of the response to what was labeled a “criminal conspiracy” made their action all the more effective and gave it longer-lasting impact. Their first protest was, if anything, more outrageous, as they gave an impromptu performance of “Putin Peed His Pants” in Red Square while setting fire to “a poster of Putin kissing Qaddafi.” “The cops got us afterwards for trespassing,” she writes. “We told them we were drama students.” Their next performance had more serious consequences, as they performed inside a church, shooting a video that they would post on the internet of a performance of a song with the lyric, “Virgin Mary, Mother of God, Be a feminist! Be a feminist!” They escaped from the church, but once the video went viral, the search intensified as the band mates conducted interviews by cellphone from coffee shops or wherever else they stopped while on the run. However, they refused to leave Russia because “revolution is a story. If we fell out of it, disappeared, it would be their story, not ours.” Here, the author reclaims and extends that story, showing how one woman’s refusal to stop agitating, even while incarcerated, gave the Russian government a lot more trouble than it had anticipated.
An inspirational memoir about youthful idealism and the power of popular culture to challenge the status quo.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-16492-6
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 11, 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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