Powerful and bleak: Huntley doesn’t see much but bones for the Kosovars to be gnawing on in the near future.
Diary detailing a charged and watchful year living in Kosovo directly after the Serbs’ retreat.
Huntley wasn’t along just for the ride when she accompanied her husband to Kosovo, where he worked to rebuild the legal system from the ground up. She wanted to be usefully engaged, and, judging by this journal of her year as an English teacher to a group of young Kosovars, she was. Huntley lived in Prishtina, which lacked phones and postal service and had only intermittent e-mail; the town was physically spared but “ethnically cleansed” of Albanians by Serbs. Living there required a high tolerance for chaos and filth (“the air is visible,” she reports), but she could hear the call to prayer through the cries of blackbirds and witness the return of a community from exile. (Not all the community, she is quick to point out: Serbs and Romas walked ever so softly if they dared to return at all—and most didn’t.) The author does a justifiable amount of intelligent hand-wringing over US intentions in Kosovo, which proved, as she expected, to be cut-and-run. Much of the narrative concerns the aspirations of her students, torn between the desire to be with their families and the longing to get away. Coming across most forcefully here are the everyday revelations of a land, history, and circumstance so different than any the author had ever known: the honor-bound blood feuds, the pervasive fear, the long memories so successfully exploited by ideologues, the organizational jockeying and international politicking amid the misery, the remarkable instinct to survive, but also the godawful crushing of that instinct when experiences are just too horrible to be absorbed. The Old Man and the Sea, with its portrait of persistence in the face of pain and suffering, naturally struck a chord with her students, who gave their book club its author’s name.
Powerful and bleak: Huntley doesn’t see much but bones for the Kosovars to be gnawing on in the near future.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58542-211-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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