The author’s hand is equally adept in a sailing epic masterfully told with emphasis in all the right places. (Illustrations)
The legendary sailboat America and its trumping victory over British vessels to establish the America's Cup, appealingly portrayed by maritime historian Shaw (Flying Cloud, 2000, etc.).
When the schooner America thrashed its British opponents during a race around the Isle of Wight in 1851, it epitomized the courage, innovation, and drive that were fast becoming keynotes of the national character. The race salved American pride after the articles sent to represent the US at London’s Great Exhibition—“a long, evil-looking Bowie knife, a grain thresher, a plow, a device for mass-producing screws, and a safety pin”—were scornfully compared to the great artistic offerings of Europe. While Shaw makes note of these circumstances, he is more interested in the boat itself and the working stiffs who designed, built, and sailed it. Schoonerman Dick Brown and naval architect George Steers are the objects of Shaw's fascination rather than the owners, though the social strife brought aboard immediately before and during the race by backers like John Cox Stephens is important to the story, as is the challenge the race and its benefactors have kept alive. So there is plenty of good material on Brown's Sandy Hook Pilots association and their place of honor in US maritime history, and on the revolutionary concepts of design America embodied. Shaw likes his narrative braced with its share of nautical patois (“Douse that foresail! Look lively, boys!”; “Land ho! Broad off the port bow!”), but instead of feeling contrived, the patter conveys readers to the wooden deck and the pleasures of the salt wind. Shaw's faith in Brown, his crew, and America is infectious: “They knew every one of her nuances, quirks, and foibles. A sailing vessel is almost a living thing. No two are alike. They require a subtle and knowing hand at the helm.”
The author’s hand is equally adept in a sailing epic masterfully told with emphasis in all the right places. (Illustrations)Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3516-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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