A broad collection of pieces by the MacNeil/Lehrer commentator and author of Life Itself (1992) and Children of War (1983). (Over half of the latter is reprinted here). The ``Man in the Water'' is the heroic passenger in the 1982 air crash who pulled others from the icy Potomac and then perished. With such unforgettable, often inexplicable images, Rosenblatt connects the subject of death with ``the deepest mysteries,'' which he finds ``in facts.'' In the tradition of his heartbreaking essays on children in Cambodia, Belfast, and Lebanon, his recent essay on the Sudan describes a civilization ``on the brink of extinction.'' Some 100,000 boys walked barefoot, sometimes 1,000 miles for weeks or months, to escape the warfare that killed their families and destroyed their Sudanese villages, where Rosenblatt noticed a sign in a hospital posted for the American Ambassador that read ``thank you for coming to see us dying of disease and injuries.'' Rosenblatt conveys the horror of this desolate, isolated landscape ruled by the ``silence'' of starving children too weak to cry out and by the world's failure to recognize and respond. Always analytical, he attempts to decipher Nixon, Reagan, the Louds, Murphy Brown, ``Black Autobiography,'' Lewis Thomas facing death, the teaching of literature, and even ``beauty''—which he recognized in the presence of three elderly women who would read to him as a child. The guiding persona who seeks out morally wrenching subjects is also funny on the subjects of fast food, his attempts to diet, and his brother's telephone pranks. His iconoclastic advice to journalists is to ``betray your sources'' and to ``dwell in a state of puzzlement'' by acknowledging contradictions in people like his courtly physician father and in situations like the ``remote control'' Gulf War, where television seemed to lead away from the truth. In these acute observations and provocative stories, Rosenblatt proves himself one of America's finest and most needed commentators.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42693-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1993
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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