A cathartic, blisteringly candid family portrait of abuse, dysfunction, and eventual epiphany.
A Frenchwoman reflects on the familial abuse she witnessed and suppressed for years.
Kouchner’s moving, elegantly written memoir begins in 2017 with the unexpected death of her mother, Évelyne, with whom she’d been estranged. Though none of Évelyne’s five children were by her side when she died, they were reunited at the hospital, looking like a “slightly decrepit but reformed rock group.” The author chronicles her affluent upbringing, providing intriguing details about her father, Bernard, a diplomat, and free-spirited Évelyne, a feminist intellectual and political scientist who, in the 1960s, had a romance with Fidel Castro. Kouchner, a lecturer at the University of Paris, describes the bourgeoisie milieu of her large extended family, which also encompassed political dignitaries, and their carefree attitudes toward nudity, libertarianism, and a variety of social and cultural issues. The author is distinctly cleareyed when chronicling her family’s mental deterioration after the suicides of her grandparents. She is equally lucid in her depiction of her mother’s remarriage to her (unnamed) stepfather, a high-profile French intellectual and “combination of Michel Berger and Eddy Mitchell.” At their family home, he emerged as a rambunctious yet beloved and kind “constitutionalist.” However, his relationships to his stepchildren carried murkier undertones. In graphic chapters, Kouchner details the sexual abuse her twin brother endured at age 14, and she writes poignantly about how the suppressed guilt, “begat by lies” and shame she felt, bled into her adulthood and became “a new twinhood.” The secrecy clouded new relationships, while her brother, who went on to have “a truly brilliant career,” still suffered. “Over the slow process of rebuilding themselves, victims continue to believe they’re guilty for a long time,” writes Kouchner, “a classic process that I instinctively grasped and understood.” When she and her brother publicly broke their silence, the ensuing explosive ordeal scandalized French society enough to inspire new legislation on incest and rape.
A cathartic, blisteringly candid family portrait of abuse, dysfunction, and eventual epiphany.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-63542-212-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
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