A portion of Solzhenitsyn's memoir, The Oak and the Calf (1980), that could not be published originally because it reveals his allies in the Soviet Union and how he managed to get his writings out of the country. Solzhenitsyn was convinced from the first of the importance of what he was writing and of its ability to hurt the communist system. Here he gives us some idea of the desperate energy with which he worked. Of The Gulag Archipelago he writes, "It even seemed as if it was no longer I who was writing; rather, I was swept along, my hand was being moved by an outside force." But he also makes it clear that his efforts would have been fruitless without the many people (he mentions more than 100 by name) who, at risk to their freedom, their careers, and in some cases their lives, worked selflessly to help him. He tells of the fear that ruled their days and the precautions that became part of their being; of the ways in which they typed, hid, and ultimately spirited abroad the various manuscripts that then burst upon the world. He is particularly interesting in his analysis of his appeal to the public at large, which in the late 1960s was almost complete, such was the revulsion against the system; he lost much of his popularity as his own aims, including his religious feelings, became more apparent. He chronicles his initial ignorance of Western journalism and his slowly growing comprehension as to how journalists could help in his struggle against the Soviet Union. But for all its heroism and insight, of all Solzhenitsyn's books this may be the least satisfactory: His respect for those who helped him and his own reticence on personal matters join to make it perhaps the closest thing he has ever written to socialist realist odes to heroic tractor drivers.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1887178422
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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
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
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