Evocative, sharply drawn portraits and a wry, knowing narrative voice make for an engrossing history.
A summer of sun for despondent exiles.
In July 1936, the Austrian-Jewish writers Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) and Joseph Roth (1894-1939) met in Ostend, Belgium, a seaside resort town that promised them a respite from the political turmoil perpetrated by Nazi Germany. As Weidermann, literary director and editor of the Sunday edition of the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, portrays them in this taut, novelistic history, his first book to be translated into English, both men were facing personal and professional crises. Although Zweig was an enormously popular writer, his German publisher had just dropped him, and his latest book, on Calvin, elicited wrathful reviews. He wanted to wrest himself from his domineering wife and “dependent, needy, vain, useless” daughters to run off with his young, adoring mistress. Zweig was “tired, irritable, and depressed. He was sick of literature,” sick of politics, sick of life. Roth, who had been supporting himself as a journalist, was distraught when his two recent novels were banned and burned in his beloved Austria. An angry alcoholic, he yearned nostalgically for the past, for “an old Austria and its monarchy, its empire,” for “the great, glittering capital” of Vienna as it was in his youth. In lyrical prose, Weidermann re-creates the atmosphere of an ephemeral moment for both writers and the disillusioned men and women who gathered with them: German playwright Ernst Toller; Czech writer Egon Erwin Kisch, who was virulently anti-fascist; Hungarian-born journalist Arthur Koestler; Zweig’s diffident lover Lotte Altmann; and Roth’s new lover, Irmgard Keun, a beautiful, feisty woman who had sued the Nazis for damages when her novels were banned (she lost). Weidermann’s focus, though, is on Zweig and Roth: Zweig, “self-confident, worldly, with a firm stride, like an elegant shrew in his Sunday best”; and Roth, dumpy, unkempt, “like a mournful seal that has wandered accidentally onto dry land.”
Evocative, sharply drawn portraits and a wry, knowing narrative voice make for an engrossing history.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-87026-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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
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