In Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part III, Michael Corleone says of the Mafia, which he is trying to leave, ``Every time I think I'm out, they pull me back in.'' Such is the experience of the New Yorker's Brodeur (The Great Power-Line Cover- Up, 1993, etc.), who joined the American intelligence community shortly after WW II. Brodeur retired disgusted with the regular extortion, browbeating, and lack of regard for human dignity in their interrogations of suspected spies in divided postwar Germany. Unfortunately, as Brodeur goes on to uncover the environmental threats that made him famous (asbestos, microwave radiation, etc.), he finds the military-industrial complex cropping up again and again, with old associates turning up to spy on him under the guise of friendship. While much of Secrets concerns Brodeur's discoveries of the scandals about which he has written, he also turns the lens on himself, using his novelist's flair for allegory to include bits about his personal secrets—an older brother whose existence his father had kept from him, his own two-year-old son's death from choking, his broken first marriage. While this information gives an insight into Brodeur that we haven't had before, the writer is still strongest when exposing the powers that be, whether it is CIA involvement in covert operations all over the globe since the Eisenhower administration, giving special attention to those areas we know less about, such as the Congo or Indonesia, or whether it's J. Edgar Hoover's destruction of the life of actress Jean Seberg, who committed suicide over her support of the Black Panthers. Brodeur covers postCold War America with a broad indictment of Justice Department foul-ups in Ruby Ridge, Waco, and the Olympic bombing in Atlanta. Sexagenarian Brodeur has produced a retrospective that proves his writing can still pack a punch.
Pub Date: April 29, 1997
ISBN: 0-571-19907-0
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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