A congested but nevertheless in-depth investigation of an overlooked war and the types of people drawn to it.
From debut author Clough comes a historical biography of an American’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War.
Born in New Hampshire to a prominent family, Barton Carter seems to have had a happy childhood of New England excursions, good schooling, and genial family relations—“His parents and siblings adored him, and they knew they could always depend on him, regardless of the circumstances.” After attending Williams College and securing a job at “a conservative investment bank and private equities firm” in London, one might think Carter would have settled down to a comfortable life abroad. After a visit to Spain, however, he finds a country in a state of upheaval. It’s 1936, and the Spanish Civil War is escalating. Journeying to Barcelona, where various anti-Fascist groups seem in high spirits, Carter notes that “practically every other man was a militiaman.” He finds that “in just two weeks, the people of Spain had transformed him.” Beginning with a job driving a truck for the nonpolitical National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief, the book follows Carter’s involvement with his new calling and the many atrocities of war that surround him. But, as his sympathy for the Republican cause increases, how long will he resist the role of a combatant? At its best when detailing the heavy fighting of the later days of the war, Carter’s quest takes on a bleak quality that illustrates the eventual hopelessness of the cause. Likewise, later chapters detailing the author’s own quest to tell Carter’s story are full of intrigue, not the least of which involves a visit to a medium. Forced dialogue—“Hello. I’m Bart Carter. I’m from America and am working as a truck driver for the NJC”—may cause attention to wander in early portions. The payoff, however, is a standout tale of a brave young man’s determination to participate in history, no matter how sad the eventual conclusion.
A congested but nevertheless in-depth investigation of an overlooked war and the types of people drawn to it.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-6518-0
Page Count: 816
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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