Zola had a knack for turbulence, both in his fiction and in his personal life. This lively account documents one of the most...
A chronicle of Émile Zola’s exile in England after the novelist’s involvement in the Dreyfus affair.
In 1894, French army captain Alfred Dreyfus was found guilty of passing military secrets to Germany, stripped of his rank, and sentenced to prison on Devil’s Island in French Guiana. Four years later, Zola argued for Dreyfus’ innocence in “J’Accuse,” an open letter to France’s prime minister that was published on the front page of the newspaper L’Aurore. Zola not only claimed that Dreyfus, who was Jewish, couldn’t have passed along the secrets, but he also accused the French army and government of corruption and anti-Semitism. When Zola was convicted of libel, fined 3,000 francs, and sentenced to a year in prison, he fled to a series of locations in London and the English countryside. In this well-researched history, Rosen (Children’s Literature/Goldsmiths, Univ. of London; What is Poetry?: The Essential Guide to Reading and Writing Poems, 2016, etc.), a British poet, broadcaster, and former Children’s Laureate, documents Zola’s activities while in England, which included working on the novel Fécondité, indulging his passion for photography, and, most painfully, writing home. Zola left behind his wife, Alexandrine, and his mistress, Jeanne Rozerot, the mother of his two young children, Jacques and Denise. Rosen draws from many sources, including the adult Denise’s memoirs and Zola’s many letters home, in which he expresses concerns over Jacques’ osseous tuberculosis and laments that he and Jeanne won’t be together for their 10th anniversary. Rosen digresses too often with unnecessary details about Zola’s family life, but the book is still a thoughtful examination of anti-Semitism and French jurisprudence in the late 19th-century. The author also tells his story with great wit, as when he writes that Zola cycled through villages so perfectly neat that he “wondered where the English hid their poor people.”
Zola had a knack for turbulence, both in his fiction and in his personal life. This lively account documents one of the most turbulent and consequential episodes of all.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-68177-516-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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