A fresh, occasionally biting report from the early days of a mustang sanctuary.
With the assistance of literary publicist and author Sneyd, rancher Day (co-author, with sister Sandra Day O’Connor: Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest, 2002, etc.) delivers a lively report of his four years tending 1,500 unadoptable wild mustangs.
When Day embarked on a project to release a large herd of wild mustangs that had been rounded up by the Bureau of Land Management, it was uncharted territory. The author had recently acquired 35,000 acres of undulating grassland prairie in southern South Dakota that he felt was ideal for turning out the horses to roam. In a warm, salt-of-the-earth manner—“Good luck had stuffed itself in my pocket long ago, and adventure had been my friend since I was old enough to scramble on the back of Chico...trying my five-year-old darnedest to keep up with the big cowboys”—Day recounts how he was able to get the BLM, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Congress to support the program. Soon, he found himself with a rambunctious collection of mustang rejects. Day passionately explains what it is like to learn ranching in the Sand Hills and how to tame the wild horses, which, under their normal conditions, would prefer to have little to do with humans—e.g., when Kevin Costner dropped by to see if Mustang Meadow Ranch would be suitable for filming part of Dances with Wolves, upsetting the horses in the process: “A few horses started pawing the ground. They began to vibrate like a hive of irritated bees, their heads now alert, their tails swishing….Within a minute, the herd was stampeding.” There was an ugly finale to the project but not before Day brought to life the ranch and its wild array of flora and fauna.
A fresh, occasionally biting report from the early days of a mustang sanctuary.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8032-5335-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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
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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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