by Timothy Snyder ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2008
Snyder deftly handles the still-thorny questions about national and sexual identity embodied in this single, remarkable life.
Sympathetic portrait of cross-dressing archduke Wilhelm von Habsburg (1895–1948).
Wilhelm was “raised to protect and enlarge the family empire in an age of nationalism,” writes Snyder (History/Yale Univ.; Sketches from a Secret War, 2007, etc.), by becoming a Ukrainian prince, “subordinate to the Hapsburg emperor.” The dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian empire after World War I put an end to this notion, but Wilhelm continued to devote himself to the cause of Ukrainian independence. Snyder unravels Wilhelm’s story in a straightforward manner, beginning with key moments in his early life. At age 14, he enrolled in a military school in Moravia that novelist Robert Musil (an alumnus) had described only three years earlier as a hotbed of homoerotic activity. “Homosexuality, royalty, and the military were closely associated” in central Europe, writes Snyder, mentioning several contemporary scandals. During WWI, Wilhelm led Ukrainian troops and hoped for a role in an independent nation, but by 1922 the Ukrainian National Republic had been split between Poland and Russia. He wandered Europe at loose ends and in 1931 arrived in Paris, where he apparently indulged in liaisons with fellow aristocrats, furtive late-night visits to homosexual brothels and cross-dressing. When a female lover embroiled him in a fraud scheme gone wrong, he fled to Austria and briefly became enamored with Adolf Hitler, whom he thought might be favorable to his crusade to bring independence to the Ukraine. By the time World War II began, however, Wilhelm was a firm opponent of the Nazis. He became involved with Ukrainian nationalists again after the war, but the Soviets, intending to absorb all of the Ukraine, arrested Wilhelm in 1947; he died of tuberculosis after a year in captivity. The author tempers this grim personal denouement with a satisfying account of how the Ukraine finally achieved independence years after Wilhelm’s death.
Snyder deftly handles the still-thorny questions about national and sexual identity embodied in this single, remarkable life.Pub Date: June 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-465-00237-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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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 Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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