Historian Enright (America’s Natural Places: Rocky Mountains and Great Plains, 2009, etc.) showcases the careers of Osa and Martin Johnson, explorers, wildlife-movie pioneers and inseparable adventure seekers.
At the age of 16, Osa walked out of the 1909 popular lecture and photo display put on by Martin Johnson in Chanute, Kan., after his return from the South Seas. She thought the show was ugly and repulsive, but the two hit it off and, within a month, they had married. On Osa’s initiative, they took the lecture on the vaudeville circuit to raise money for joint explorations in the South Seas. She never lost this ability to act decisively, which many times saved her husband’s life. Sharing their lives, they revisited the South Seas, and then followed up with three visits to Kenya before returning to the South Seas again. Except for an Explorers’ Club membership, which Osa, as a woman, could never attain, the two were inseparable until Martin’s tragic death in a plane crash in 1937. During their adventures, Osa and Martin pioneered using movie to record wildlife in their natural habitat, and their films remain a source of documentation for studies of wildlife today. The couple traveled and filmed in a time of transition, while the British were establishing preserves like Serengeti and ruthlessly clearing wildlife from areas designated for settled agriculture. Osa continued after Martin’s death, writing books for adults and children, and her groundbreaking TV series Big Game Hunt. The couple’s delight and happiness in living the life they made for each other shines through.
Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7627-6360-3
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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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