An uneven but ultimately inspiring personal story of an American mountain biker finding her vocation as an international...
An adventurous American mountain biker's journey of self-discovery in Afghanistan.
"It's a place I'm inexplicably drawn to—wanting to understand it in hopes that I may understand myself,” writes Galpin, whose life was derailed by a violent attack and rape in her early 20s. She later helped with fundraising to help girls' schools in Afghanistan, and she became the first American woman to mountain bike in Afghanistan. Since then, she has made several trips there, developing relationships and pursuing her own brand of activism. Full of vivid anecdotes, the narrative is most enjoyable when recounting the author’s chronicles of her travel and interactions with Afghans. Galpin also takes us through her divorce and her struggles as a single mother in Boulder while founding her nonprofit, Mountain2Mountain, to promote "the power of voice" through support of the arts and bike riding by women. Eventually, this led to a photography exhibit in Afghanistan, a TED talk, her meeting with the Afghan women's national cycling team, and her creation of an international program, Strength in Numbers. The power of voice is a constant theme, though what exactly that power amounts to in either the political or spiritual realm remains somewhat vague. Galpin seems anxious about being heard, sometimes to the point of undermining the power of her book with long sections in which she defends her choices as a mother and activist and airs her frustrations with the world of nonprofit organizations. Her many descriptions of uniformly upbeat banter with her young daughter also feel indirectly defensive. However, her respect and love for the Afghan people is apparent, as are her nerve and determination to help those in need.
An uneven but ultimately inspiring personal story of an American mountain biker finding her vocation as an international activist.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04664-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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
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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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