An astute, deeply respectful encounter between man and wolf.
The sweet and cautionary tale of a wolf that liked to play with dogs.
The story opens in the early winter of 2003, just north of Juneau, Alaska, near Mendenhall Glacier. Juneau-based journalist Jans was out skiing on the frozen lake by his house when his eye caught a track that wasn’t laid down by a dog. Two days later, he and his dogs ran across the creature: a good-sized, black-haired wolf, easily double his biggest dog, a barrel-chested Lab. The wolf was imposing, to be sure, but as personality or genetics or the alignment of the stars would have it, it was also crazy for dogs. Jans is a fairly cool customer, and he is concerned about issues surrounding habituation and the conflict it can spawn for wild animals, but when he was caught in the beams of the wolf’s amber eyes, “a wild-edged thrill swelled in my chest.” So tolerant was Romeo—and yes, the author understands the cautions about naming a wild animal, but could this be a “friendship”?—that he became a local celebrity, with all the inevitable polarizing that caused. Wolves, Jans explains, just strike the wrong note with many humans, a reminder that we do not sit alone atop the food chain. In neat slices of natural history, the author explores what we know about the history of wolves, though he also wheels about freely, including elements of memoir here, profiles of his neighbors there. The meat of the story, however, surrounds Romeo: his trails, which he tends with loving care; his masterful ability to decode intentions; the joy and fearmongering his playfulness brings; and the bum raps and rumors that he has to shoulder for every wolf in the region.
An astute, deeply respectful encounter between man and wolf.Pub Date: July 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-547-85819-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
