Uneven testosterone-fueled entertainment.
The spirited account of how a Scottish newspaper sales executive built and lived in a log cabin in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness.
After being demoted from a prestigious marketing job, writer and outdoorsman Grieve suddenly realized that he had to end what had become an “increasingly mournful journey through the corridors of cubicle hell.” He concluded that the antidote to his woes was to head to the wilds of Alaska, where he could rediscover his masculinity and find a path to freedom for himself and his family. A year later, a series of lucky breaks landed Grieve in a remote forest miles from the nearest human settlement. A hard-bitten Yukon transplant named Don and the members of his extended family educated the ardent Scotsman in the ways of survival and helped him build the log cabin that would become his home. A “neurotic and needy” dog named Fuzzy became Grieve's only companion. At first, the author reveled in the hunting, fishing and trapping that defined his daily routine. But as the harsh Alaskan winter settled on the land, Grieve began to see the extent of the risks he had taken with his life and the future of his family back in Scotland. Yet the headiness of living among bears, moose and wolves, learning how to become a dog-sled driver and surviving against the odds drove him onward and gave him insight into “how utterly small and insignificant” he really was. Grieve's Jack London-esque narrative is engaging, but it is undercut by what comes across as the author's irritatingly impotent feelings of guilt for seeking self-actualization away from his family.
Uneven testosterone-fueled entertainment.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61608-820-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
