by Ted Anton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1996
Blood in the ivory tower: a real-life thriller about postCold War espionage, an unsolved murder, and the occult. Professor Ioan Culianu of the University of Chicago died in a ``Mob-style assassination'' in May 1991. Although the crime remains unsolved, Anton (English/DePaul Univ.) blames Culianu's brutal and humiliating murder in a bathroom stall on Romania's secret police, the Securitate. The Romanian-born Culianu was a scholar of international renown, whose outspoken criticism of the Communist and post-revolutionary regimes in Romania endeared him to some and made enemies of others. Yet, while its argument turns on political issues, the book's canvas is far broader, like Culianu's own work in the history of religion and myth. Anton's is a gripping and sophisticated investigation. It undertakes a complex analysis of Culianu's life and death and the multiple layers of connections between the two. For Culianu was not a dull and cloistered professor, but a colorful, ambitious young man in whom some saw the ``consummate academic hustler.'' Aside from his vast scholarly publications, he wrote fiction and political commentary, and hoped to publish fantasy fiction. At the heart of Anton's study lies Culianu's scholarly interests in myth, magic, the occult, and otherworldly journeys. A crucial part of his identity was his role as hand-picked successor to the distinguished scholar of myths, Romanian-born Mircea Eliade, whose involvement with the preWW II fascist Iron Guard placed Culianu at the center of a stormy dispute akin to the one aroused by Paul de Man's Nazi journalism. But Culianu also created a myth of himself as the omniscient opposition, and the Securitate took the bait. Was it ambitious posturing? Was it passionate ideology? Anton unfolds his tale by letting this extraordinary personality speak for himself. Murder, passion, and politics as the fascinating true story of one Romanian-born academic's postmodern rise and fall.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8101-1396-1
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Northwestern Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1996
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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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