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THE QUEST FOR GRAHAM GREENE

A BIOGRAPHY

An occasionally enticing if episodic inquest into Greene's lifelong balancing act on ``the dangerous edge of things'' (his favorite Browning quote). Armed with findings from Greene archives at Boston College and the University of Texas, Austin, West's (editor, Orwell: The War Commentaries, 1986) book amends some neglected points in Norman Sherry's thoroughly researched, ongoing authorized biography (1989, 1994), disputes much of Michael Sheldon's animus-driven Graham Greene: The Enemy Within (1995), and corrects Greene's own misleading memoirs. The sometimes scattered results of West's quest for the real Greene do not form a compelling or truly coherent psychological portrait—conjectures about Greene's adolescent breakdown and his relationship with his psychoanalyst (and the analyst's wife), for example, are especially tenuous—but they do score a few intriguing points. His big coup, tied together from several sources, is the secret behind Greene's self-exile from England in 1966. The scenario, which involved one Tom Roe, Greene's dubious financial advisor, who was mixed up with counterfeiters and Hollywood Mafia, and Roe's disastrous and fraudulent handling of some of Greene's off-shore investments, is as seamy as any in his novels (and West finds some inside jokes about currency smuggling in Travels with My Aunt). More often, though, West only dutifully brings to light peripheral players, such as James Hadley Chase, a thriller writer Greene edited while working in publishing after the war, and Ben Greene, a pacifist cousin who was a political internee during the Blitz, without making solid claims to their roles in Greene's life. Even his revelations about Greene's continuing relationship with the double-agent Kim Philby, including their later correspondence in the last phase of the Cold War, await complete disclosure. While Greene aficionados anticipate Sherry's next volume, West supplies them with some tantalizing points and leaves open many, many questions. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)

Pub Date: Feb. 12, 1998

ISBN: 0-312-18161-2

Page Count: 336

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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