by Tom Foreman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 6, 2015
Even the author's long-suffering family had to admit at the end of the season that he was happier, and readers will enjoy...
The chronicle of a father’s response when his daughter asked, “How would you feel about running a marathon with me?”
Emmy Award–winning CNN correspondent Foreman did not utter the first words that came to mind: “Dear God, why?” Though he may have been an ex-marathoner, now in his early 50s, he writes, “my knees made stranger sounds when I climbed out of bed. You could play ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown’ on the muscles in my lower back. I had the flexibility of a stepladder.” However, prodded from deep inside his autonomous nervous system, he agreed. As the author quickly realized, a promise to a daughter—a freshly minted aeronautical engineering student—was not a thing to be taken lightly (even if she did). Foreman recounts the 16 weeks of training required to morph from someone with the “grace of a hog tossed from a train” to someone who can get back up and continue running after a nasty spill. Foreman’s prose is as gladsome to read as a glass of cold lemonade after a brisk five miles. He stuck to the running plan, and within a few weeks, he writes, “even on days when the schedule called for rest, I found myself longing to run.” The journey became bearable, even fun, though there were more than a handful of bumps in the road. The story climaxes with a grim, humorously rendered, 55-mile, cross-country slog, but the most colorful and lasting episode is the zydeco-accompanied minimarathon in New Orleans—where Foreman had to rush to the medical tent to bandage his nipples and where the race volunteers dispensed martinis instead of water. Conversation with his daughter: “Should I grab [a martini]?...I’m pretty thirsty.” “No.” “Why? Because it’ll slow me down to be drunk?” “Because you’re eighteen.” “This town is a riot.”
Even the author's long-suffering family had to admit at the end of the season that he was happier, and readers will enjoy running alongside him.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-17547-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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