A unique, engaging memoir balancing personal story with broader social themes.
A pioneering pilot’s story of breaking gender barriers, fighting discrimination, and making peace with her experience.
In this debut memoir, Shipko takes readers through her career in aviation, from washing planes at her father’s fixed-based operation at a South Florida airport to becoming the first female pilot hired by Hughes Airwest, in 1976. Although she stopped flying in 1981, Shipko’s deep knowledge of aviation and the personalities of each plane she flew are evident in her detailed descriptions of flights taken decades ago. Her early years as a pilot were spent doing freelance flying out of Miami’s Corrosion Corner—“history, danger, and romance all wrapped up in one”—ferrying cargo and passengers throughout the Caribbean and Latin America. The tedium of loading and unloading tons of Bahamian fruits and vegetables was balanced by the opportunity for a swim on other island runs, delivering emergency supplies to Belize in the wake of a hurricane, and a night spent in a Colombian jail. During those Florida years, Shipko faced some antagonists and resistance to a woman in the cockpit, but that harassment was minor compared with the attacks at Hughes Airwest. Shipko writes with evident pride of her professional growth yet also describes in vivid detail the verbal, emotional, and physical harassment she faced from male pilots who resented her presence. The book places these experiences in historical context, long before companies were held liable for sexual harassment. When the stress of resisting and attempting to ignore the abuse caused serious health problems, Shipko took medical leave from Hughes Airwest and eventually retired from flying. Tracing her evolution in the decades since, she compellingly explores the roles her Catholic faith and family played in developing her understanding of the challenges she faced.
A unique, engaging memoir balancing personal story with broader social themes.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1507667637
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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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