Critics will charge, rightly, that this account smacks of hagiography—but taken for what it is (i.e., a personal memoir of...
A loving, tender portrait.
For readers who don’t want to plow through George Weigel’s hefty biography of John Paul II (Witness to Hope, 1999), this slender volume by former US Ambassador to the Vatican Flynn (A Public Body, 1998) is a good choice. The author first met the future pope in 1969. At the time, Flynn was a candidate for state representative in Massachusetts, and Karol Wojtyla (as he was then known) was the Archbishop of Krakow. Flynn left their first meeting wishing he could talk to him longer. Eventually, of course, Wojtyla became John Paul II, and he made another trip to Boston, where Flynn renewed the acquaintance. At that point Flynn began to “keep track” of the pope, following his visits to the US and his papacy more generally (one of the most moving passages of the book is Flynn’s description of the horror and anxiety he felt when the Pope was shot). While serving as mayor of Boston, Flynn was asked by President Clinton to serve as ambassador to the Vatican. After some hesitation Flynn accepted, in large part because he wanted to get to know John Paul. He did. As ambassador, he had the chance to discuss many important international issues (such as the Vatican’s relationship with Israel and the troubles in Ireland) with the pope, and he came to know him as something of a family friend. The author provides an insider’s portrait of John Paul, depicting him as both genuine believer and a shrewd politician. He describes the pope’s devotion to the Virgin Mary, and his attempt to respond to the Shoah. Above all, he humanizes him, painting a portrait of a sometimes-melancholy pontiff, a man who was concerned when Flynn’s son was hospitalized, a friend who seemed sad to see the ambassador leave in 1997.
Critics will charge, rightly, that this account smacks of hagiography—but taken for what it is (i.e., a personal memoir of an enigmatic and powerful man), it is deeply satisfying.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-26681-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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