Barnes’ tour of life is entertaining and informative, though it doesn’t hold a candle to the likes of Ackerman, Durrell and...
British sportswriter Barnes (The Meaning of Sport, 2005, etc.) takes a stretch to write about the 10 million species, more or less, that share the world with humankind.
The figure is debatable, but no matter; there’s a certain inviting quality to any natural history text that asserts that the so-called lesser creatures are not so much lesser than we and that “the mite that lives in the follicles of your eyelashes is as fully, as exquisitely, as perfectly evolved as you are.” Barnes follows with a description of slug sex, which is not a matter for the squeamish. Taking the opportunity to introduce the technical term “apophallation,” he notes that the culmination of a bout of slug love is for one of the parties involved to chew off the penis of the sort-of male, because slugs are hermaphroditic up to then, after which the slug, now without, continues life as a female. “A backbone isn’t essential to an interesting life,” he sagely observes. Sadly, some of that charm wears off quickly as Barnes indulges. For one thing, he overwrites startlingly, sometimes with an eye to establishing street cred: “I’ve experienced quite a lot…wildebeest in the Serengeti, dolphins breaching in front of the boat, eye contact with a bear, a colony of bee-eaters, a stooping falcon, a gathering of crocodiles, a horizon-filling chorus of frogs, leaping salmons, being within touching distance of 12-foot basking sharks, watching the passeggiata in the Piazza Navona.” The tendency to overstate runs strong throughout, although there are some useful pointers that help make up for it, including how to bluff your way out of being eaten by a lion.
Barnes’ tour of life is entertaining and informative, though it doesn’t hold a candle to the likes of Ackerman, Durrell and Attenborough.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3035-6
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Marble Arch/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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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