by Maria Tumarkin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 2019
Provocative reading for those willing to put in the effort.
A book of extended annotations of familiar axioms that challenges readers to connect a lot of dots.
Born and raised in Ukraine when it was then part of the Soviet Union, Tumarkin (Otherland: A Journey With My Daughter, 2010, etc.) immigrated to Australia as a teenager and has continued to live and work there as a cultural historian and writer. She has maintained that the five parts of her latest book—the winner of the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award—should not be considered as separate pieces. However, most of them could stand on their own as well-reported literary journalism, with the author very present in her own work in a manner occasionally reminiscent of Joan Didion. Tumarkin explores the fragility of adolescence, the generational perpetuation of poverty and addiction, the manner in which suicide defies easy explication or rationalization, and, throughout, “the nature of human nature” and the failures of Australia’s culture and legal system to accommodate the vagaries and nuances of human behavior. The most powerful—and perhaps most straightforward—section, titled, “Those who forget the past are condemned to re—,” concerns a grandmother imprisoned for hiding her grandson from his estranged mother, who has regained custody after her husband’s death and will subject her children to the mistreatment of her thuggish soon-to-be husband. “I came to this country thinking it was a civilised society,” said the grandmother,” a Holocaust survivor who had expected so much better of Australia. “How wrong I was. It’s a wild, wild West. A modern country filled with barbarians.” While this passage isn’t the only indictment of the author’s adopted country, her work is more of an illumination of the human condition. Tumarkin asks deep, difficult questions and refuses to settle for easy answers.
Provocative reading for those willing to put in the effort.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-945492-29-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Transit Books
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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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 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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