Entertaining reading for the intrepid at heart.
A memoir by a former NFL cheerleader who traded her pom-poms for a life of adventure as globe-trotting primatologist.
Mayor was the American-born daughter of a single Cuban mother who “didn’t take the typical scientist route.” Her love of the natural world began in early childhood, but as she grew older, the pressure to assume a more normative femininity increased. By the time she reached high school, she “had become a full-fledged girlie-girl and performer.” Once in college, however, her passion for wildlife was rekindled, and she soon found herself living a double life as an anthropology student and NFL cheerleader. At 22, the fashion-obsessed girl who idolized Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall earned the first of many grants that would take her to study primates in South America and Africa. For all her research work in the field—and as a roving TV correspondent for National Geographic—Mayor never gave up her trademark stylishness, even when the going got tough. While the author’s colorful background is unquestionably unique for a scientist, she occasionally overplays both her distinguished credentials and the “girliness” that has differentiated her from her colleagues. But this is perhaps understandable given the subtle and not-so-subtle forms of professional discrimination she faced for being an intelligent, attractive woman who also liked “wearing pink boots and tanks tops.” Ultimately, Mayor’s defensiveness and tendency to self-promote is redeemed by the gutsy grittiness and wicked sense of humor that allowed her to survive danger, disease and sexism.
Entertaining reading for the intrepid at heart.Pub Date: March 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4262-0721-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
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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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