by Sanford Tweedie ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2013
Readers may not relish the country or love the people as much as the author confesses he does, but despite the overblown...
Before it came crashing down in 1989, the wall that divided East Germany from the West had stood for a generation. Now, a later generation in the East still bears vestiges of that Cold War separation.
Courtesy of a Fulbright grant, Tweedie (Writing Arts/Rowan Univ.) took a post teaching English composition for a year in what, in former days, was the heart of the communist German Democratic Republic. He was based in Erfurt, once the regional center of the Stasi secret police. Nearby is a Buchenwald memorial. Today, Western influence has seeped into Erfurt; Tweedie notes McDonald’s and American music. The Tweedie family was housed in a dreary concrete prefab apartment. Though he had merely passable language skills, the author nevertheless soon found Germany and Germans to be comfortable and cordial, and he and his family made good friends. Tweedie works hard to find significance in all that happened during the year, from a stolen car to rides on the streetcar. Double beds and dinky Trabant autos serve as analogies for life after the phantom Wall, and there’s further importance to Karl Marx kitsch or participation in an acrobatic circus performance. Readers are led down divergent paths with varied narratives, anecdotes and snapshots. Yet, despite imagination and experience, the author acknowledges the lack of a genre, a form on which to draw—thus, perhaps, the stretched metaphors and his tendency to overwrite (for example, the time he “chortled” at a comment).
Readers may not relish the country or love the people as much as the author confesses he does, but despite the overblown search for meaning, they may enjoy the trolley ride.Pub Date: May 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8032-7141-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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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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