by Meena Alexander ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1993
A memoir by Alexander (Nampally Road, 1990), tracing her life from childhood in India through youth and education in Africa and England to marriage and motherhood in Manhattan. Alexander's desire to overcome the ``torment'' of her ``multiple migrations'' in order to tell her story, however, is undercut by overwriting and an oceanic sentimentality. Beginning the story of her life with the story of this book's writing—an editor's pitch in an Upper West Side cafe; sleepless nights in the author's apartment spent assembling the ``fragments of a broken geography''—Alexander weaves back and forth between present and past, mixing metaphors and memories with abandon. ``I sit here writing, for I know that time does not come fluid and whole into my trembling hands. All that is here comes piecemeal, though sometimes the joints have fallen into place miraculously, as if the heavens had opened and mango trees fruited in the rough asphalt of upper Broadway.'' Born in 1951, the first of three daughters of a meteorologist, Alexander was raised in southern India before her father was transferred to the Sudan when she was five. From her summer visits back to her ancestral home, Alexander reconstructs her childhood idyll: There are her adoring and wise maternal grandfather in his garden of mango trees and cashews; her shrewd but affection old ayah (nanny); and the self-contained, genteel world of the joint family household. Forays into the social and political issues raised by postcolonialism and feminism occur throughout the text, but Alexander focuses on her own cultural identity crisis as metaphor for them. In her decision to wear a sari one day and a pair of jeans the next, she implicates the future of cultural difference and the integrity of the nation state. Alexander's view of herself as a sociopolitical microcosm seems far-fetched and self-absorbed; as a result, what might have been a revealing memoir remains a carelessly crafted reverie. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 1-55861-058-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Feminist Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
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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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SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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 ; edited by Alan Rosen
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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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