Weaving together events she witnessed and those gleaned from her father’s papers, Law-Yone gracefully conveys the dramatic...
The life of a noted Burmese newspaper editor and activist, recounted by his daughter.
Ed Law-Yone, outspoken owner, editor and publisher of Rangoon Nation, the city’s most influential newspaper, left his writings, diaries, notes and letters to his daughter, Wendy (The Road to Wanting, 2011, etc.), hoping that she would use them to tell her family’s story. She felt daunted: “The intricacies of Burmese politics! The byzantine characters and their biblical genealogies! It would take more than a labor of love to disentangle the skeins of Dad’s narrative.” In the 20-plus years since his death in 1980, she published several novels, before the author finally felt ready to investigate her “burdensome legacy.” The result is both an intimate personal memoir and a vivid history of Myanmar, formerly Burma, during decades of roiling upheaval. Ed Law-Yone took over the Nation in 1948, just as Burma won its independence from Great Britain. Sheltered by “the cocoon” of her family, the young Wendy did not see the political chaos around her as a fragile central government was attacked on all sides by groups of insurgents. Political volatility made newsgathering exciting but dangerous; her father, she discovered, kept a loaded gun in his desk. Nevertheless, he enthusiastically embraced his position as a public figure, attending international conferences, embarking on goodwill missions around the world and forging close relationships with men in power. In 1962, however, a military coup overthrew the elected government. Although at first Ed Law-Yone felt protected by his good relationship with the new leader, Gen. Ne Win, soon his role as gadfly and muckraker was quashed—he was arrested and incarcerated for 5 years. After his release, he left the country with his family and joined other Burmese exiles abroad to mount an opposition campaign to the oppressive military government—efforts that ultimately failed.
Weaving together events she witnessed and those gleaned from her father’s papers, Law-Yone gracefully conveys the dramatic story of her youth, her family, and a remarkable man’s life and work.Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-231-16936-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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