Russian poet, author, and political activist Yevtushenko (Ardabiola, 1985; Fatal Half Measures, 1991, etc.) recalls three days that shook the world—the attempted coup of August 1991—in a richly textured novel that serendipitously blends whimsical love stories, political suspense, and autobiographical commentary. Beginning with a puzzling order for 250,000 handcuffs that Special Investigator Stepan Palchikov is instructed to give the chief of a top-secret installation, the story moves a few months ahead, to August 1991, when Communist hard-liners move to overthrow Gorbachev. As the events of those three days in Moscow unfold, cast members including Yeltsin, Gorbachev, cellist Rostropovich, Foreign Minister Shevardnadze, and Yevtushenko himself make their appearance in separate chapters. Each offers brief reprises of their life, their reasons for appearing on the White House balcony with Yeltsin or for being part of the supportive crowds, and the emotions the coup evokes. Two life stories take center stage, giving the growing political drama a touching, sometimes even sentimental, tenderness. There is the apparatchik Palchikov, whose devotion to politics and work has destroyed his marriage to zoologist Alevtina. Meanwhile, as Alevtina searches for her missing python (also a character), Palchikov recalls his past, heroically commits himself to the new order, and determines to woo back his wife. The other story, that of former soccer star Lyza, does not end so happily: Lyza's great crossed love for a woman who adores climbing—even the Kremlin towers—ends tragically on the barricades. Linking them all are the writer's own memories of his Siberian childhood, the KGB's attempts to enlist him, their efforts to discredit him, and his responses to the current changes, which are not always sanguine. Contemporary history given the enlivening, even immortalizing fictional spin that only someone with a poetic sensibility, and someone who was there, can give. And an affecting tribute to a country and its remarkable people. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-44574-9
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
