The rather unorthodox biography of Helen Bamber, a British woman who has devoted her life to supporting the welfare of international victims of torture. In his first book, Belton, an editor at Granta Books, begins Bamber’s story by describing the plight of the Northumberland Fusiliers, a machine-gun battalion captured at the fall of Singapore in 1942. The tremendous physical and emotional trauma suffered by the veterans during the war was heightened upon their return by the sense that British society was unable to acknowledge their suffering. Years later, it was Bamber who began the healing process by listening to the men describe their experiences. What makes this biography unique is that Belton himself employs this listening tactic: Throughout much of the book, he fills in the outline of Bamber’s life with accounts by those who have come into contact with her, as well as with historical chronicles of events through which she lived. Bamber’s presence in the work is that of a witness who is able to retain a sense of humanity in the face of absolute human degradation by allowing victims of torture to give voice to whatever has befallen them. Evidently, her entire career was shaped by her experience as a member of the Jewish Relief Unit sent to the concentration camp at Belsen to coordinate aid to emancipated Jews shortly after WWII. There she gained an understanding of the power of testimony to induce healing. After almost 20 years as a leader in Amnesty International, Bamber was appointed director of the Medical Foundation for the Treatment of Victims of Torture, where, now in her 70s, she continues to carry on her work. A complicated tangle of bleak historical moments and traumatic personal narratives, surprisingly converging into the life story of a compassionate and highly moral woman.
Pub Date: April 16, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40100-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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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