by Robert Vivian ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
Sharp prose and exquisitely described images characterize a series of contemplative essays.
Vivian’s (English and Creative Writing/Alma College; Another Burning Kingdom, 2011, etc.) essays embrace consistent themes of calmness, simplicity and peace. The first essay, “Ghost Hallway,” sets the tone for the collection, introducing the spirit of a middle-aged woman Vivian returns home to each evening. She mentors him, slowing him down to see beauty in the ordinary. Readers will feel her touch woven throughout the book. In most of the pieces, Vivian paints vivid images then ruminates on why he is drawn to them: a red-robed bishop shows him how to walk with grace through “the vague malaise dripping like a bad faucet at the heart of town.” As compared to the perfect smiles of most Americans, the snaggle-toothed and ramshackle grins of the Turks signal that “perfection is not possible” and that “maybe there’s something even a little sinister in the very idea of a total whitewash.” The solace of a Laundromat, surrounded by the “smells of clean laundry, in the sudden bloom of hot air from an opened dryer,” portrays the beauty of shared mundane rituals. While many of these essays are set in Michigan or Nebraska, Vivian also takes us to the hills of Turkey, the Danube River, Auschwitz and an abandoned Jewish graveyard in Poland, journeys that demonstrate how disparate cultures broaden his perspective. Beautiful essays to read and savor one at a time.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8032-3431-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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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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