An awkwardly self-conscious but affecting blend of history and memoir.
Poet and novelist Svoboda (Tin God, 2006, etc.) chronicles her uncle’s odyssey in occupied Japan and unearths some troubling truths about the U.S. military.
The disjointed nature of her memoir may be connected to the reluctance the author admits feeling when her aging father and uncle pestered her to write about the latter’s 18-month stint as an MP at the close of World War II. Svoboda wasn’t particularly close to Uncle Don, and she wasn’t sure that recording his memories of the Nakano stockade outside Tokyo was going to alleviate the depression he’d slipped into in the spring of 2004, as reports on prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib began to surface. But then he committed suicide, and the author began listening more intently to the tapes he had sent her. Was there a secret he had been holding inside all these years? Calls to other veterans and a trip to Japan helped Svoboda unravel the story, which she tells in fits and starts, alternating her narrative with excerpts from her uncle’s tapes. In 1946, Nakano was the Eighth Army stockade; it housed military personnel convicted of various crimes and waiting to be shipped home to serve their sentences. Most of the prisoners were black men, who were convicted at far higher rates than white soldiers. (Svoboda discovered that 20 of the 21 reported executions in the Pacific during the war were of African-American soldiers.) At one point, Uncle Don remembered, the head captain announced that the stockade was overcrowded and they would begin executing prisoners sentenced to death. Other vets contacted by the author confirmed that a gallows was built, but records of the actual executions were extremely difficult to track down. In Japan, she doggedly asked residents of Nakano what they remembered, and their replies helped her craft this tortuous look at a desperate, shameful era.
An awkwardly self-conscious but affecting blend of history and memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55597-490-9
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
