The story of two brothers and the turmoil, in the Catholic Church and American society, through which they have lived. Philip and Daniel Berrigan gained fame in the 1960s for such dramatic acts of war resistance as pouring blood on draft files; they remain among the best-known Catholic priests in America, even though neither holds positions of significant influence in the Church (Philip married, and left the priesthood in 1973). Journalists Polner (No Victory Parades: The Return of the Vietnam Veteran, 1971) and O'Grady (Dorothy Day: With Love for the Poor, not reviewed) move beyond the well-known episodes to examine the Berrigan brothers' lives in context: how they came to be relentless foes of war and how their decades of uncompromising protest- -continuing to the present—have affected their country, church, friends, and opponents. The Berrigans' fervor is traced to their working-class Catholic upbringing. Reflective, intellectual Daniel, scorned by a violent and rigid father, joined the Jesuits as a teenager. The more worldly Philip, two years younger, came to the priesthood only after stints as a soldier and college student. Ordained in the 1950s, both were activists virtually from the beginning, progressing by the late 1960s to the point where they were openly at war with their government and with the Church hierarchy. As charismatic teachers and priests, as radicals willing to go to jail for their beliefs, the brothers developed an influence (with Daniel's poetry helping to convey the message) that spread through a generation of peace activists and a Catholic community energized by the liberalizing reforms of Pope John XXIII. A fascinating and well-told story, but not fully satisfying. The source of the passion driving the Berrigans' deeds remains elusive, perhaps through no fault of the authors: The brothers, who confess to near-absolute certainty in their moral choices, harbor few of the doubts that help humanize and illumine most lives. (b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Jan. 29, 1997
ISBN: 0-465-03084-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1996
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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