Bumpy, but a unique, imaginative take on the family memoir.
Political activist Huber (Writing and Linguistics/Georgia Southern Univ.) combines original research, historical fiction and personal recollections in her attempt to connect with the anti-Nazi grandfather she never met.
Seeking an example of those who balanced activism, career and family as she struggled to do, the author traveled to the Ruhr region to study the life of her maternal grandfather—“Opa” in German—Heinrich (Heina) Buschmann Jr. Huber’s mother once called him a “nobody,” but he was in fact a tireless voice for the working class and a respected leader of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD), a group caught between the extremes of Communism and Nazism. To discern this voice and “summon” her grandfather, Huber crafts fictional scenes from Heina’s life, interspersing them with passages about her own parallel experiences. Heina hands out leaflets for a parliamentary election; Huber protests the Iraq War. Heina considers leaving the party his father helped build when it supports rearmament; Huber devastates her immigrant mother by quitting college and joining an anarchist group. These echoes are occasionally forced, and the disparity between consequences for activists in a brutal dictatorship and those in a free-speech democracy sometimes makes the author’s examples seem trivializing. In addition to inhabiting Heina’s thoughts, Huber sets herself a further challenge in striving to understand his brother, Jupp, who joined Hitler’s elite guard, the SS. The narrative’s tension is undermined when historical passages are directly succeeded by commentary identifying them as fabrication. Even so, sharp human insights on the omnipresent moral complications of living in Nazi Germany make this a worthwhile read.
Bumpy, but a unique, imaginative take on the family memoir.Pub Date: March 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1080-6
Page Count: 380
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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