A prosaic memoir of public life by the respected former president of the Federal Republic of Germany (1984—94). After six years of combat duty during WWII, WeizsÑcker earned a law degree in war-ravaged Germany and worked for several major corporations during the next two decades. In the 1960s he became active in the ecumenical church movement, holding responsible positions within the German Protestant Conference and on the executive committee of the World Council of Churches. He was elected as a Christian Democrat to the German parliament in the early 1970s and served admirably as the mayor of West Berlin from 1979 to 1981. Throughout his public life, his chief political concerns were world peace and reconciliation with both East Germany and Eastern Europe. His most noteworthy accomplishment was a speech in the Bundestag on May 8, 1985, calling for a truthful recognition of Germany’s Nazi past, reconciliation with former enemies, and restitution to and a plea for forgiveness from victims of Nazi brutality. This speech set the moral tone for the rest of WeizsÑcker’s presidency. He represented his nation abroad with dignity and fostered good relations with neighboring nations, most importantly the Soviet Union, which was instrumental in the achievement of German reunification in 1990. All this he relates with a certain detachment. There are few intimate revelations, and in recounting his life under Nazism, WeizsÑcker provides no details about his wartime experiences on the Eastern front, surely seminal for an understanding of his subsequent career. He defends the honor of the German army and implies that his family was sympathetic to the German Resistance against Hitler. Most disturbingly, he proclaims the innocence of his nationalistic father, Baron Ernst Freiherr von WeizsÑcker, a high-ranking Foreign Ministry official convicted of crimes against humanity at Nuremberg. Such a glaring moral blind spot, though personally understandable, renders this memoir hollow, a disappointment to the discerning reader. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 6, 1999
ISBN: 0-7679-0301-3
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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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