A satisfying morsel for fans of The Four Feathers and Lawrence of Arabia—or perhaps of Rafael Sabatini.
A ripping tale of martial glory, commemorating a little-known fighter in a now-forgotten war.
Amedeo Guillet, now 93, was born into a Turin family whose members considered themselves Savoyards first, Italians second, defenders and protectors of “Europe’s oldest and most tenacious ruling dynasty.” Entering military service as a young man, he shone brightly as a familiar of the soldier king Vittorio Emmanuele III, an equestrian member of Italy’s 1936 Olympic team, and an able leader. A fine soldier, yes—but was he a fascist? British journalist O’Kelly sidesteps such distinctions, suggesting that although Guillet had only the dimmest inkling of what Mussolini intended when he started sending his troops into Libya, and then Ethiopia, he stood ready to serve, convinced that it was his country’s duty to bring law, order, and civilization to the heathens. Guillet distinguished himself as a cavalry commander against the fish-in-a-barrel opposition of Haile Selassie’s troops, served a spell in Spain fighting for Franco, then returned to the desert to take on the British, who proved better armed and tougher than his earlier foes. After leading one of the last great cavalry charges in history against a British tank column, he slipped away to organize a guerrilla band that included his Ethiopian lover. (“They had been friends, enjoying each other as life flashed by,” O’Kelly writes in a bodice-ripping moment. “But an empire had fallen since then, and their relationship had deepened.”) After bothering the British a while longer, he returned to Italy just in time to surrender to the Allies, then spent the postwar years serving as a diplomat until retiring to Ireland, enjoying the company of former enemies. O’Kelly spins out this improbable tale with a good eye for dramatic incidents, in which this account abounds, avoiding the usual blood-and-guts clichés. If only our hero—and so he was—had fought for a better cause.
A satisfying morsel for fans of The Four Feathers and Lawrence of Arabia—or perhaps of Rafael Sabatini.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-00-655247-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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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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