Eloquent, bittersweet, memorable reflections.
A World War II Royal Navy fighter pilot turned journalist recalls a long, full life becoming a man of the world.
Born to a French mother and a father involved in secretive “special operations” during the war years, Stevenson (A Man Called Intrepid: The Incredible WWII Narrative of the Hero Whose Spy Network and Secret Diplomacy Changed the Course of History, 2009, etc.) grew up in East London dreaming about faraway places. At age 16, during the London Blitz, he volunteered at the British Navy office and gradually made his way through stages of assessment as a pilot; he recounts his adventures and poignant loss of buddies in short, punchy chapters. “Help me justify being alive,” he swore to the memory of lost comrades, and he decided to devote his life to the romantic idealism of his boyhood. In peacetime London, he got a job with Mercury News under Ian Fleming, who first informed him of an infamous man who shared his name, but with a different spelling: William Stephenson, who was well-known in British spy circles, and whom the author would later come to write about in A Man Called Intrepid. Stevenson relocated to Canada to work for the Toronto Star under the leadership of the enigmatic Harold Comfort Hindmarsh, or HCH, from whom he solicited approval for stories by submitting brief notes in his pigeonhole. The author was sent all over the world to cover exciting history-making moments (“HCH: Might it be worth confronting the killer of Leonid Trotsky in Mexico?”), and he records such encounters with Jawaharlal Nehru, Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong, the young Dalai Lama, Ho Chi Minh (who impressed him mightily), Khrushchev and many others during his travels and documentary-making into Southeast Asia and Africa from the 1950s onward.
Eloquent, bittersweet, memorable reflections.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7627-7370-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
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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