by John Gierach ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 17, 2011
A prolific fly-fishing expert and nature writer dispenses hard-won field-and-stream wisdom.
Few writers, if any, have written about the implications of fly-fishing as eloquently as Ernest Hemingway in The Big Two-Hearted River, but Gierach (Fool’s Paradise, 2008, etc.) brings detailed insight and a sense of humor to the subject. With a title taken from an Annie Dillard quote (“There is no shortage of good days; it’s good lives that are hard to come by”), the book is a collection of fondly remembered fishing trips and random fishing-related topics, along with miscellaneous other narrative odds and ends thrown in the mix: fishing and firewood, fly-fishing versus bait fishing, fly-fishing’s countercultural history, salmon fishing, the experience of fishing with guides and even a random chapter on the perils of combining fishing with the pain-in-the-neck necessity of book tours. The author’s strength is his obvious obsessive drive to find the perfect fishing spot and make the perfect cast; his travels take him from his home state of Colorado to Canada, Wisconsin, Washington State and Mexico. While his fisherman’s jargon can get a bit too specialist-sounding for non-expert fisherman, Gierach’s good for plenty of man-of-the-soil maxims. On the subject of fishing on film: “Fishing is like sex in that it can be anywhere from deeply meaningful to just plain fun to participate in, but it’s oddly boring to watch in videos.” Though his thoughts occasionally veer off on unforeseeable tangent, even these detours often have a certain charm: One minute he’s talking about hooking wild trout in public water; the next, he’s on to some old-fashioned transcendentalist contemplation on the frivolity of material wealth. Gierach’s genial campfire manner and woodsy witticisms should hook more than just the average fishing fanatic.
Pub Date: May 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9175-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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