by Ted Morgan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2006
Effectively employing a subdued tone, Morgan paints a grim picture of hopelessness leading to desperate militancy, reminding...
An unforgettable cautionary narrative of the author’s days as a French combatant and military journalist during the war for Algerian independence.
Biographer and historian Morgan (A Covert Life, 1999, etc.) spent most of his youth in America, but he was also a French citizen, subject to conscription in that nation’s military. One day he was a cub reporter for a newspaper in Worcester, Mass., the next found him a soldier headed to Algeria. It was 1956, not a happy time to be steaming into the Bay of Algiers. Urban terrorism saw its first systematic use there in the campaign of bombings and assassinations by Algeria’s National Liberation Front (FLN); the French adopted an open display of barbarity in response. Morgan doesn’t pretend that he behaved differently at first: He admits to having beaten a suspected insurgent to death during interrogation. Retelling that dreadful story in a hollow, detached voice, all he can say is that it disfigured him for life. Fortunately, he soon moved to work as a writer for a government newspaper; at this propaganda sheet churning out “perception management,” he could study the Algerian situation without having to participate in human destruction. Morgan knows how to drive a narrative forward, but the story comes wrapped in dispassion, as if the whole situation is too grotesque for him to hold it close. Yet there is incredible firsthand material: the French paratroopers’ methods of torture, the specifics of FLN bombings and the step-by-step dismemberment of the FLN in Algiers. For those whose images of the war and its combatants were shaped by Gillo Pontecorvo’s pro-FLN The Battle of Algiers, the book’s most startling element may be the wrecking job done on the image of Yacef Saadi, the organization’s less-than-heroic leader in the city.
Effectively employing a subdued tone, Morgan paints a grim picture of hopelessness leading to desperate militancy, reminding us that electroshocks and guillotines rarely solve anything.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-085224-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Smithsonian/Collins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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