Fairly interesting as a family saga, but stridently unhelpful as analysis.
Bound-to-be-controversial argument that “Zionism has coursed through the [Jewish] diaspora like a poison.”
“The blindness of American and British Jews to the criminality of Israeli behavior towards the Palestinians beggars belief,” continues Marqusee (Wicked Messenger: Bob Dylan and the 1960s, 2005, etc.) in a passage of characteristically overheated rhetoric. In the eyes of this secular, agnostic, yet still Jewish commentator, Palestinians are simply victims of Zionist oppression. He firmly rejects the charge that anti-Zionism is the same as anti-Semitism or an example of “Jewish self-hatred.” He resents “the Zionist claim to speak for all Jews everywhere,” offering his family history as an instance of the complicated nature of Jewish identity. Marqusee devotes the bulk of the book to the story of his maternal grandfather, Edward V. Morand, a complex, belligerent liberal active in New York leftist politics before, during and after World War II. A champion of intermarriage, assimilation and tolerance, EVM (as his grandson calls him), became a steely Zionist as well, and Marqusee describes his 1948 editorials in support of Israel’s creation as providing “a slow-motion, close-up view of a man of conscience committing a colossal historic error.” In support of his own inflexible opposition to the state of Israel, a disaffection nursed since his teens, Marqusee offers selective historical tidbits. Valid points about Jewish racism against Arabs and the moral ambiguities of the Six-Day War are compromised by the author’s refusal to acknowledge that there are militant jihadists who call not just for the destruction of Israel but for the death of all Jews everywhere. Self-righteous and reductive, his polemic won’t convince anyone not already in his camp. It also seems unlikely that EVM would agree with his grandson’s contention that “my anti-Zionist politics are actually an evolution of your legacy, working its way through another half-century of history.”
Fairly interesting as a family saga, but stridently unhelpful as analysis.Pub Date: April 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-84467-214-1
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Verso
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2008
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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