Though the humor is sometimes strained, and the tone dated, the period charm and infectious goodwill more than compensate.
A genial successor to Our Man in Belize (1997) continues Conroy's deliciously unserious memoirs of life in the Foreign Service in 1960s Vienna, where suspected Russian spies apply for visas and the notorious mistress of mobster Bugsy Siegel asks for help.
Conroy frankly admits that his memory has sometimes failed and that names have been changed, but he offers a wryly humorous recollection all the same. His view is not from the lofty perches of the Embassy but the more lowly regions of the Consulate, where he is initially a vice-consul responsible for issuing visas. Vienna is not Belize, and the eating and drinking is so good that he soon regains most of the weight he lost in Central America. Antiques (especially fine Art Nouveau pieces) are cheap, too, and as a pianist there are not only concerts to enjoy but superb pianos to acquire. But it's also the height of the Cold War, don't forget, and applications for visas to the US must be carefully scrutinized (which means Conroy often has to meet with the CIA over lunch to discuss such applicants as the businessman who claims he was only wearing a Red Army uniform in a photograph in his file to impress his girlfriend). The author describes colorful colleagues like Theo (the dipso legal adviser who invaded Stalingrad on a bicycle) and relates the various odd jobs that fell his way (such as ensuring that an elderly American who wanted to be a ballet dancer got his monthly remittance, and helping an old woman from Brooklyn escape from a Budapest man she was convinced was slicing flesh off her feet). But after dealing with this rich mix of cons, innocents, and lost souls, Conroy was eventually transferred to Washington, where he learned to tangle with an often obtuse State Department and some devious official foreign visitors.
Though the humor is sometimes strained, and the tone dated, the period charm and infectious goodwill more than compensate.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26493-3
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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