A serviceably written yet inspired exploration of the meaning of commitment.
A celebrated long-distance hiker’s account of how she captured the Appalachian Trail speed-hiking record.
For Davis, the Appalachian National Scenic Trail was no ordinary footpath. It was the place where she had met her first love, a man who broke her heart in 2007. Four years later, it became the place to which she once again felt “called” by God to “praise Him with the talents and gifts He had given me.” Davis had by then married a fellow Christian named Brew who had been helping her do something totally new: supported hikes. With his help, she broke the women’s thru-hiking record in 2008. She did not attempt the overall record until 2011, however, since she knew it would involve her somewhat reluctant then-boyfriend Brew. “I don’t know if my husband would ever have agreed to such a difficult, thankless task if we hadn’t planned the adventure directly after we got engaged,” she writes. Davis began her marathon hike in the rugged mountains of Maine, following the A.T. through 12 other states and into “the heart of backcountry Georgia.” Brew faithfully met her with food and water at designated stopping points, while fellow hiking enthusiasts accompanied her along portions of the trail. Over 46 grueling days, Davis endured injuries, illness, emotional meltdowns, sleet storms, extreme heat and stifling humidity, all of which tested the limits of her mind, body, marriage and friendships. In the end, she discovered that her 2,181-mile journey was not just about living out a dream, but about understanding the nature of love. Like the A.T. itself, “love is not always easy and not always fun.” At the same time, it is the truest way to becoming “your best self.”
A serviceably written yet inspired exploration of the meaning of commitment.Pub Date: June 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8253-0693-8
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Beaufort
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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