An engaging account of one man’s determination to overcome personal, financial and bureaucratic obstacles in his quest to...
A previously unpublished biography of a pioneer in the field of international law who is responsible for inventing the word “genocide” and defining legal terms for preventing future genocidal acts.
When Nobel Peace Prize nominee Lemkin died in 1959, the manuscript of his biography was near completion. However, it is only recently that Jewish historian Frieze digitized Lemkin’s manuscript and, in the process, pulled the biography together into a readable narrative. The story of Lemkin’s life begins with recollections of his early years on a farm in Lithuania (b. 1900), where he became engrossed with the natural world surrounding him and, also, began a fascination with reading about historical instances of group persecution. As the deputy public prosecutor of Warsaw, the Armenian genocide drove Lemkin toward a focus on the prevention of government attempts at destroying a collective identity. For Lemkin, the act of genocide did not just target the lives of a particular group, but it also aimed to destroy the cultural identity of the persecuted minority. The realities of genocide became personal when Lemkin was forced to flee Nazi-occupied Poland, while his family back in Poland fell as victims of the Holocaust. After making it to America, Lemkin sacrificed his physical health, the comforts of family life and the financial stability associated with faculty appointments at Duke and Yale to dedicate his life to alerting the world to the dangers of genocide. His dedication bore fruit when the United Nations ratified the Genocide Convention, but Raphael would spend the rest of his life alone and in poverty. Although the particulars of the inner workings of the U.N. can be overwhelming, the story is enriched by Lemkin’s keen eye for describing the environment and characters that he encounters.
An engaging account of one man’s determination to overcome personal, financial and bureaucratic obstacles in his quest to pass a landmark law that would protect collective cultural life and identity.Pub Date: June 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-300-18696-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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
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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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