Flawed but occasionally moving.
An attorney and horse trainer’s account of how he socialized, and ultimately befriended, an abused, psychologically damaged wild horse.
When Bornstein first met Samson the mustang, the horse had already earned a reputation as a “flesh-eating, fire-breathing monster.” His owner had rescued him from a trip to the slaughterhouse as a gesture of goodwill. However, she discovered that Samson was not only untrainable, but also dangerous to both humans and other animals. Bornstein quickly realized that a major part of Samson’s problem was that he had been misunderstood and abused by almost every human he had known. Rather than seek voluntary compliance, previous owners had used “bullwhips, lariat ropes, anger and pain” to school Samson to proper ways of behavior. The author knew he would have to earn the animal’s trust before he could ever hope to ride him. As he describes the yearlong-plus process of training—but never quite breaking—his fierce mustang charge, Bornstein also tells the story of wild horses in the United States. Descended from Old World equines brought to North America by the Spanish conquistadors, mustangs became one of the great symbols of the American West. But by the end of the 19th century, many settlers viewed them as a “scourge” that needed to be exterminated. Since then, ranchers, working alone and in tandem with government agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, have massacred or displaced thousands of animals “to stave off alleged rangeland degradation.” The author’s examination of the history of wild horses is informative but shallow; his sensitive portrayal of his evolving relationship with Samson is the highlight of the book. At the same time, that depiction is somewhat one-sided in that the author does not probe his own life and past to reveal the deeper personal lessons that Samson taught him about himself.
Flawed but occasionally moving.Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-05941-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
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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