A memoir by an author whose striking photos are more illuminating than his quirky sentences.
Through personal musings and photographs, Roberts (Figments and Fragments, 2012) explores poignant moments during a life of extensive world travel.
The octogenarian author opens his memoir by urging readers to recognize and appreciate the artistry that’s all around them—to “keep your eyes open for beauty that is deeper, wider, higher, further, more memorable, unlimited and moving than you ever imagined.” He recalls his youth in England in the shadow of World War II, during which he was raised by intellectual, authoritarian parents. His early experiences in the Royal Air Force and his independent journeys around Europe helped him develop a taste for travel. It was further enhanced by his career at Coverdale, a management-training organization where he found his “life’s work: task-focused, small-group development.” His job, he says, took him around the world “from Canada to New Zealand.” In a collection of photos, he highlights what he felt were particularly powerful or symbolic moments along the way. He accompanies each image with a brief description of why it was, and is, significant for him, followed by descriptions of the photos’ specific locations and why he happened to be there. Finally, Roberts describes his various romantic relationships, and his time spent with family members and traveling companions; he even chronicles his life as he was writing this book. Readers will likely find the photography section to be the book’s highlight, as it features striking scenes of nature as well as intimate portraits. Some readers may struggle, however, with what Roberts himself calls “idiosyncratic punctuation”; sentences such as, “I see now this was my opening into the ‘and-and’ vs ‘either-or’ dualism approach to life, the non-dualistic way may all choose but counter-cultural to centuries of ‘the/my way,’ ” may confound more than they communicate. However, after readers view his photos, most will agree that visual art, rather than prose, is Roberts’ true medium.
A memoir by an author whose striking photos are more illuminating than his quirky sentences.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1460215081
Page Count: 176
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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