An instructive book that attempts to extend the message of brotherhood and compassion that has been forged from tragedy.
Tragedy opens a dialogue between a former white supremacist and an Indian immigrant whose father was killed in a massacre at a Wisconsin Sikh temple.
As the title suggests, bad can lead to at least some good, and violence to healing, when it gets different kinds of people to talk to each other, understand each other, and even learn to love each other. Early on, Serve 2 Unite co-founder Kaleka admits, “my anger was eating me alive” following the 2012 murder of his father amid a shooting rampage by a white supremacist. Though former skinhead Michaelis (My Life After Hate, 2010) hadn’t known the killer, he recognized him as if he were looking in a mirror at his younger self. “My gut told me what no one was reporting yet,” he writes. “This was a strike by the radicalized far-right movement. An attack to say, ‘You’re threatening our race and we’re going to eliminate you before you destroy us.’ It had all the markings of white supremacists—specifically, racist skinheads, the faction I helped to establish nearly twenty years before.” The narrative alternates between the immigrant’s story of coming to and adjusting to the Midwest and the one-time racist’s story of years venting his rebellious anger and then eventually overcoming it. It climaxes with the murderous attack, which left emotions raw and both co-authors searching for answers. They found them in each other and successfully established a dialogue that bridged their very different backgrounds and led to the formation of Serve 2 Unite, an organization of “relentless optimism in the face of adversity” through which the two “continue their mission as brothers in a quest to bring about healing and wage peace.”
An instructive book that attempts to extend the message of brotherhood and compassion that has been forged from tragedy.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-10754-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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