First-rate reporting and erudition underlie this successful effort to re-establish the reputation of an indispensable...
A United States Geological Survey scientist returns with a rich account of one of his predecessors: Thomas Jaggar (1871-1953), a somewhat forgotten pioneer in volcanology.
Dvorak (Earthquake Storms: The Fascinating History and Volatile Future of the San Andreas Fault, 2015), who now operates the telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii, a site where Jaggar spent some enormously productive years, brings not just a sharp understanding of the scientific issues involved, but also a humanist’s heart. We see him as a flawed human being but a ferociously dedicated researcher, a fearless adventurer (who ran toward eruptions), and a visionary. The author begins with Jaggar’s Cincinnati boyhood in the home of an important local clergyman, then commences his swift, engaging accounts of Jaggar’s numerous visits to remote (and dangerous) sites, travels that make the word peripatetic seem insufficient. Alaska, Japan, the Caribbean, Hawaii—these are a few of the places he traveled to understand what fascinated him the most: the power in the Earth. Dvorak pauses occasionally to chronicle Jaggar’s personal life (which became somewhat scandalous), but these stories, though important, are not his focus. He seeks to teach readers about volcanology—and does so in terms that laypeople can comprehend—and he makes us feel the excitement, the fear, and the intense heat of a lava flow. We get some Hawaiian history, as well, with an especially interesting section about the origin of the goddess Pele and how many Hawaiians were quick to credit or blame her for the vagaries of the volcanoes. Occasionally, Dvorak steps into the story to add some information about one of his own related experiences, no more affectingly so than when he visited the Japanese relatives of one of Jaggar’s Hawaiian assistants, a family rounded up during the World War II internment-camp period.
First-rate reporting and erudition underlie this successful effort to re-establish the reputation of an indispensable scientist.Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-60598-921-1
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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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