A wonderfully diverse collection of essays, memoirs, letters, and interviews that comprises a robust spectrum of views on the Kosovo conflict and the NATO air campaign.
Buckley (Ethics/Georgetown Univ.) has brought together contributions from many of the major stars of the international community—UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Vaclav Havel, and Henry Kissinger, to name a few. What makes his collection even more impressive, however, are the pieces from unknown local figures—the Serbian citizens, the Kosovar victims of Serb aggression, and European journalists—who serve to question the realities and perceived realities of the outside observers on both sides of the Atlantic. Ivanka Besevic, an elderly Serbian woman living in Belgrade writes on the NATO bombing: “We are here, and we see it with our own eyes; every civilian target, our neighbors’ homes.” The compilation takes the reader on a tour of the complicated truth behind such simple questions as who exactly the KLA are—without providing any one answer to the perennial question that should trouble Americans most: Was the NATO bombing the right thing to do? If anything, these inquiries highlight just how problematic military intervention is. Was it necessary? The account we are offered of Serb atrocities says the answer is yes. Was it just? Accounts from the Serb perspective, in addition to rigorous political analyses from Kissinger and others tell us perhaps not. Can the peacekeeping operations be called a success? According to Buckley, that remains to be seen. His collection, although it is about as comprehensive as one volume can be, rings with the urgent message that this can be merely the beginning of reflection, analysis, and dialogue on the subject—not the end.
Intellectually challenging but very readable, this examination of the most troubling European turmoil of the last decade is highly recommended for both personal use and professional reference.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8028-3889-8
Page Count: 473
Publisher: Eerdmans
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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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 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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