by Dusko Doder & Louise Branson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1999
Two experienced international reporters examine the life and political career of the Yugoslav president. Doder (foreign correspondent for the Washington Post) and Branson (correspondent for The Scotsman), who most recently teamed to write Gorbachev: The Last Tsar (1990), begin this highly critical biography in March 1999 as US envoy Richard Holbrooke tries in vain to convince Slobodan Milosevic to sign a Kosovo treaty with NATO. They turn then to charting the career of Milosevic (whose first name derives from a Serbo-Croatian word for “freedom”) from his “humble and inauspicious” birth in 1941 to Serbian parents to his tragic miscalculation of NATO’s resolve during the bombing campaign of 1999. A talented student (first in his high school class and near the top of his law school class at Belgrade University), Milosevic rose slowly to power by attaching himself to the more ambitious and charismatic Ivan Stambolic and then ousting him, principally by stirring—and shaking—the “potent cocktail of Serb nationalism.— From the subtitle on, the authors can barely restrain their contempt for their hero. They condemn his “consummate capacity for lying, intrigue, and secrecy” and dub him “the Saddam Hussein of Europe” and “the high priest of chaos.— Drawing on their many years of experience in Yugoslavia, Doder and Branson guide readers skillfully through the murky labyrinth of Balkan history, pausing to explain the sources of the ethnic hatreds that erupted when the years of Communist domination came to an end, and summarizing with brilliant clarity such recent diplomatic events as the Dayton peace accords and the subsequent talks in Rambouillet, France (a “debacle,” they conclude). No one in the region, we learn, wears a white hat. Doder and Branson remind us, for example, that Albanians fought with Germany during WW II—and massacred Serbs in the process. A clear, well-crafted guide to a volatile region; a devastating analysis of the depravity of a despot. (1 map, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-84308-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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