A powerful story in which the author shapes a narrative of personal growth into a symbol of modern humanity's alienation...
Eloquent debut memoir about a young woman's transformation from a New York City urbanite into a small-town Oregon hunter with a conscience.
In her mid 20s, journalist McCaulou suddenly found that her job as an independent film production assistant had lost its charm. While the work put her in contact with indie stars and “fun, artsy people” all over New York City, she couldn't get away from the feeling that what she was doing was “one big, glitzy distraction.” On a whim, McCaulou accepted a job at a Bend, Ore., newspaper. She thought the experience would offer her a much-needed change of scenery and a new arsenal of journalistic skills. What she discovered was a lifestyle that, though “a distant cousin” to the one she had known, proved far more satisfying than anything she imagined. As she learned to fly-fish, McCaulou wrote articles about natural resources and the environment. One topic that intrigued her was hunting, which she had long associated with cruel and indiscriminate killing. The more she researched this sport, the more she came to believe that true hunters, as opposed to poachers, were really “environmentalist role models.” To better understand their lifestyle, McCaulou decided to take up the sport herself. She gradually grew to appreciate hunting for what it taught her about her relationship to the wilderness. Killing, and eating, a hunted animal created an intimate bond between her, another creature and, by extension, the land on which that creature lived. Throughout the book, the author shares her mostly profound insights.
A powerful story in which the author shapes a narrative of personal growth into a symbol of modern humanity's alienation from the natural world.Pub Date: June 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4555-0074-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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
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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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