A wealth of historical and personal detail builds a suspenseful story.
A plucky spirit and revolutionary sympathy emerge from these richly detailed dispatches by America’s intrepid minister to France during the Franco-Prussian War.
Independent historical researcher and producer Hill does a solid job editing these evocative, immensely readable extracts from the letters and diary of former Rep. Washburne (1816–1887). Stuck in Paris during the five-month siege by the Prussians from July 1870 to January 1871, though refusing to leave when the other diplomatic legations fled the capital, Washburne was determined to record for history the increasingly appalling conditions and subsequent reign of terror he witnessed firsthand. Originally a “green Yankee boy” who had plied his trade as a lawyer in Illinois before becoming a congressman known for his independence and honesty, Washburne was a “homespun” type, appointed as Minister to France thanks to his long friendship with and support of Ulysses S. Grant. With his family relocated for safety, Washburne lived alone in Paris, never in good health, yet able to maintain a dignity that the French, divided and under siege, frankly lacked. Delighted at the proclamation of a French Republic, Washburne was nonetheless horrified by the persecution of German nationals, who flocked to his legation for asylum; he visited the prisons and noted the toll of the cold and pestilence on the populace, as well as the fantastic rise in prices for foodstuffs. Bombardment was soon followed by armistice, and Washburne recorded the shameful capitulation to the Prussians and their eventual entrance into Paris to enormous martial display. With the government in the hands of the Commune, led by sadistic men such as Raoul Rigault, a reign of terror followed, duly observed by Washburne in all its sinister and arbitrary violence.
A wealth of historical and personal detail builds a suspenseful story.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6528-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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