by Julian Hoffman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 15, 2013
A deeply felt book that will lead readers to other books that inspired it.
A sharply observed, occasionally overwritten collection of essays on the interrelationships of man and nature, of soul and place.
Born in Britain and raised in Canada, Hoffman now lives in and often writes of the Balkans, near the Prespa Lakes, a region of natural splendor and deep political divisions. He and his partner “were led to this Greek village by a book. Having read a glowing review of it in a bird-watching magazine, we bought the book on the off chance that we might someday visit the region it described. But it took only a single evening of leafing through its pages, reading passages aloud, and looking at photographs to reach a decision of far greater import…it captivated us from the start.” An impetuous romantic, the author also came to love that particular place, and here, he shares that love, as well as his love of books about places, for he seems to connect with nature from a particularly literary perspective. He writes of “the resonance of place,” “the environmental vicissitudes of place,” and the feeling that “there are no clean, easy lines that connect ourselves to a place, as if we were joining up a question with its answer in a beginner’s language book.” More compelling than such grand pronouncements and conceptual conceits are the specifics of experience and detail, the wonder Hoffman finds in this seemingly insignificant woods, in the cry of this bird or the stateliness of that tree, and the exhilaration he feels as he experiences life as part of the natural world: “The places where I can look up or out, either at the vast ceiling of cloud and sky, or the disappearing horizon, and feel more or less the same thing: the inconsequential scale of our lives. Paradoxically, it is in those places that I feel most alive, experiencing a wild and shuddering depth to existence.”
A deeply felt book that will lead readers to other books that inspired it.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8203-4556-7
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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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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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