A straight-ahead, determined account by a straight-ahead, determined woman.
A seafaring Amelia Earhart chronicles her pioneering sailing career.
In 1969, Adams, aboard the Sea Sharp II, was completing her journey from Yokohama, Japan, to San Diego, Calif., becoming the first woman to single-handedly sail the Pacific. Four years earlier, at 35 and in the wake of her second husband’s untimely death, she had—amazingly, with only eight month’s sailing experience—become the first woman to journey solo from Los Angeles to Hawaii. With journalist Coates (Cambodia Now: Life in the Wake of War, 2005), Adams recounts both voyages, undertaken at a time before cell phones, computers and GPS removed much of the risk, when the whole idea of a “lady-sailor” placing herself in such jeopardy inspired controversy. Modestly, Adams makes no great claims for her seamanship or courage, nor does she confess a desire to have achieved any “firsts,” either as a mariner or a woman. Rather, she says, “I simply wanted to sail...alone and didn’t see why I couldn’t.” Notwithstanding the troubled personal life only briefly discussed here—early adoption into an unhappy household, the death of two husbands and divorce from two more, the abandonment her two young children—Adams eschews introspection or grand pronouncements on the meaning of it all. Instead, her story, which certainly contains moments of excitement and discovery, dwells on the sheer banality of such sea ventures, emphasizing the need for persistent labor and attention in the face of freely confessed loneliness, fear, depression, nausea, injury and uncertainty. She devotes a few chapters to her globe-trotting life between and after her notable solo sails, crewing in the South Pacific, joining the Queen Mary’s final voyage and working at the Marina del Rey, but the heart of this book and her importance to history rests with her solo conquest of the vast Pacific.
A straight-ahead, determined account by a straight-ahead, determined woman.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8032-1138-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2008
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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