A penniless Jewish emigrant from Nazi Germany finds wealth and happiness in the US. Founder of the Bettmann Archive, perhaps the world's best-known pictorial library, Bettmann knows where his bread is buttered. To illustrate this breezy autobiography, which runs from his birth in 1903 Leipzig to his recent appointment as curator of rare books at Florida Atlantic University, the author picked copious choice examples from his gigantic collection. With the trademark Bettmann penchant for the unusual, the pictures depict everything from Bach's skull to a toenail-cutting machine, and sometimes bear only a distant relation to the text. No matter: Every one is a gem. The prose suffers by comparison, although Bettmann does catch the fairy-tale atmosphere of N.Y.C. immigrant life in the Depression, and has some fascinating memories of the land he left behind (attending a university course taught by Edmund Husserl: ``an absent-minded, goateed Jewish man entered the class, affixed his pince-nez, and began reading in an almost inaudible voice from a prepared text''). Similar little anecdotes enliven Bettmann's tale of how he escaped the Nazis (``some kind of nut,'' one goon muttered when Bettmann crossed the border with his collection stashed in two trunks); married ``a genuine, vital American woman''; and founded the Archive through luck and, as he admits, workaholism. Famous people do walk-throughs (Edward Steichen; Barbara Tuchman; Alfred Kinsey, who buys a hot painting from Bettmann for his Institute for Sex Research). Bettmann describes the pix he never found (a portrait of Daniel Fahrenheit, inventor of the thermometer scale; a painting of Spinoza grinding lenses) and some of his peculiar assignments (cable from Mott: ``Send everything you've got on apples''). Meanwhile, the eye keeps returning to those fabulous pictures (221 b&w).
Pub Date: Dec. 31, 1992
ISBN: 0-8130-1153-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. Press of Florida
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
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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