by Raphael Gianighian edited by Vartan Gianighian ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 30, 2014
Plaintive but philosophically provocative.
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An elegiac remembrance of an Armenian’s flight from war and the cruel aftermath of a culture ravaged.
This is a family affair narrated by Raphael Gianighian and his son Vartan, who edited the work. In 1915, Raphael was forced to flee his native district, Khodorchur, after the Turks attempted to exterminate the Christian Armenians. Raphael captures his travails in about 100 pages, the first third of this remembrance. His survival against grim odds was astonishing and was partly due to his grandfather’s bravery and guile and partly due to the assistance provided by American relief organizations that mobilized to help displaced Armenians. Raphael’s account is harrowing, written in a simple but powerful hand: “We see headless, decomposing bodies floating on the Tohma River. The guards stop us in front of a big inn. We wait for our fellow countrymen to arrive. The site is crowded. The river flows below the inn, and in the front space, blood stains the tables and benches and walnut trunks. Old men with long beards smoke narghilé and drink coffee. The butchers have cut off the Armenians’ heads, stuck them on the tree trunks, and thrown the corpses into the river.” Written in the third person, the second third of the book is a pastiche of perspectives, including writings from Raphael and some of his fellow travelers, all woven together by Vartan. In this section, Raphael, after having settled in Italy, returns to Khodorchur to bear witness to the sad remnants of the village he once called home. Khodorchur is a testament not only to a victimized people, but to a culture all but vanished from the Earth. The third section of the book, written in the first person by Vartan, recounts his own emotionally tumultuous visit to Khodorchur in an attempt to learn more about his father, his family, and the ethnic heritage denied him. His own experience mirrors his father’s return from exile, marked by profound sorrow and personal transformation. This is an affecting tale, told by both father and son, as historically edifying as it is excruciating.
Plaintive but philosophically provocative.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500692551
Page Count: 206
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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