by Rezak Hukanovic ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 1996
If you read but one book about the wars in the former Yugoslavia, it should be Hukanovi's harrowing memoir of time spent in the death camps of Bosnia. For those who have found themselves growing unresponsive to the media barrage about the suffering in Bosnia, this is a sure, if painful, antidote. Hukanovi, a Bosnian Muslim journalist from Prijedor, gives us an unforgettable and often unbearable account of his stay in two of the notorious Bosnian Serb camps—Omarska and Manjaa. That Hukanovi has chosen to tell his story in the form of a third-person narrative strengthens its power as both a personal and a collective memoir. The unfolding tragedy of ``Djemo'' and his family rapidly expands to include his fellow prisoners and their communal suffering. Hukanovi movingly conveys the camaraderie born of this hell: ``Would anyone understand the tragedy of these men, linked by fate to this place? Sorrow had darkened their visages and twisted their faces. . . . All the prisoners desperately wanted was to forget all the horror, but the angel of death's carelessness had marked them as witnesses.'' Hukanovi describes sickening acts of violence, ranging from repeated bludgeoning of prisoners to mutilation, torture, and murder. But the savagery and evil of the perpetrators are related in the context of the more reflective tone of Hukanovi's narrative and the acts of kindness that he witnesses. Prisoners look after one another, family members are prepared to sacrifice for one another, and sometimes guards and neighbors aid the victims, at great risk to themselves. Hukanovi does not provide ``answers'' to questions that present themselves (i.e., what accounts for the ``chameleonlike transformation of former friends and acquaintances as they turned into crazed servants of the new authority?''). He does not broach the problems of retribution and justice. Thanks to his courageous memoir, however, readers will approach such questions with fresh, bitter, and necessary light.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1996
ISBN: 0-465-08408-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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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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