Impressive, moving, and refreshingly free of sentimentality and self-pity.
Vivid, brisk account of a young German woman’s efforts to establish a school for the blind in Tibet.
Diagnosed with retinal disease in early childhood and completely blind by 13, the author retains visual memories that help her navigate sightlessly. Tenberken still sees colors in her mind and uses them as a mnemonic device to remember phone numbers and formulas and to visualize landscapes and her surroundings. She also has remarkable parents who have encouraged her independence and sense of adventure—at one point her mother even helped out at the school in Lhasa. Tenberken, who did graduate work in Asian studies, describes how her obsession with Tibetan manuscripts led her to devise a Tibetan Braille alphabet so that she could read texts herself. In the late 1990s, needing more freedom and tired of being reminded of her supposed limitations, she flew alone to China and then traveled by road (an exhausting experience) to Lhasa, where she was determined to found a school. There were no training facilities for blind children; if their parents were poor, they were left on the streets or alone in their rooms without any teaching, diversions, or stimulation. An accomplished horsewoman, the author recalls often hazardous journeys on horseback over some of the most mountainous terrain in the world to find pupils. She describes her efforts to raise funds, to get official Chinese permission for her school, and to find suitable premises and staff. None of it was easy, but the school eventually opened and was an instant success. Then the funding dried up due to bureaucratic bungling back in Germany, her venal landlords evicted her, and the government insisted she leave the country immediately. Though discouraged, Tenberken rallied her forces and, after a tortuous overland journey to Nepal and a visit to Germany, found ways to continue her work.
Impressive, moving, and refreshingly free of sentimentality and self-pity.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-55970-658-9
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
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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