Despite its flaws, this is a moving tale nobly brought to light.
A heartrending memoir that tells the story of life in the internment camps of World War II Indonesia.
Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japanese military forces swept through Indonesia–then made up of Dutch colonies–in an attempt to secure control over the islands of Southeast Asia. Intoning the racist slogan “Asia for Asians,” the invaders set to punishing members of the European cultural and economic elite living there, seizing land and property and sending many of the islands’ Dutch inhabitants to prison camps. As a child, Wiederhold–the son of a Dutch factory manager in Java–suffered just this fate, and here he tells of his time in three internment facilities. Conditions grew worse as he and members of his family were shuffled from camp to camp, with Wiederhold witnessing unspeakable horrors, from deadly malnutrition to dehumanizing disease to torture and death. The author offers a sober assessment of the increasingly dreadful environment of the camps. His evocations of their dangers are poignant and often painful, but they are never hyperbolic. It is clear that he wishes only to accurately describe the violence of the camps, and he scrupulously avoids exploiting such violence for dramatic (or melodramatic) ends. Outside of the Netherlands, few have heard of Japan’s wartime brutality in Indonesia, and Wiederhold considers it a duty to tell his story to the English-speaking world. Therefore, it is somewhat surprising that he devotes less than half his book to recounting his time in the camps. He devotes fully three of its five movements to family history, descriptions of life before the war and details on his eventual emigration to the U.S. These sections are instructive and eloquently written, but their very length has the effect of diluting the power of the harrowing story whose retelling is Wiederhold’s central aim.
Despite its flaws, this is a moving tale nobly brought to light.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2006
ISBN: 978-1-425726-10-2
Page Count: 301
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
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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