Though touching on the unique Japanese-American experience, this is ultimately an inoffensive, pedestrian trek.
A Nisei’s story of being confined in an internment camp during World War II and hardscrabble years afterward, interspersed with a diary of high-altitude hiking.
Manzanar was the internment camp where teenage Umemoto, with his family and many other Japanese Americans, was relocated for three years during the war. Mt. Whitney, “The Big One,” was visible from Manzanar’s plywood barracks then. However, it took nearly 60 years before the author, as a senior citizen, was able to scramble to the top of the formidable promontory. Though Umemoto reveals a bit about California’s Japanese-American culture, the author’s story is mild and not particularly deep. Without much drama, Umemoto sets forth his journey from internment to success as a print-shop proprietor, and he discusses two marriages and his time in the military in Tokyo. Interposed are narratives of difficult trudges where the author was lost, fatigued or frozen—though his adventures never take on a sense of actual danger. Once, he wished he brought a Gore-Tex jacket, and once, an attempt to gnaw a frozen energy bar was fruitless since his dentures couldn’t make a dent in the thing. Perhaps this is the sort of intermittent memory piece that might attract intrepid readers, but the clear metaphor doesn’t work. What might have been an affecting memoir, a different sort of American story, reveals little that is memorable.
Though touching on the unique Japanese-American experience, this is ultimately an inoffensive, pedestrian trek.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59714-202-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Heyday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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BOOK REVIEW
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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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