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THE HAPPIEST MAN IN THE WORLD

AN ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE OF POPPA NEUTRINO

A disarmingly earnest portrait of an enigmatic figure.

The life and times of itinerant wanderer and vagabond extraordinaire David Pearlman, better known in some circles as Poppa Neutrino.

Longtime New Yorker contributor Wilkinson (Mr. Apology, 2003, etc.) writes about yet another creative eccentric. Early chapters are devoted to stories from Neutrino’s younger days, during which he engaged in fist fights in seedy bars; led a band of followers dubbed the “Salvation Navy” across the country while performing odd jobs to survive; and sailed across the Atlantic on a homemade raft in the company of his wife and two friends. The narrative is interspersed with the author’s interactions with Neutrino as well as their phone conversations. Among the highlights of their times together are visits to college and high-school football coaches to whom Neutrino attempts to pitch an idea that he believes will revolutionize football (it involves allowing quarterbacks and receivers to communicate during the action), as well as his attempt to build a new raft for a voyage across the Pacific. As the author points out, Neutrino is not necessarily the sort of man to draw the envy or admiration of others; much of his life has been spent struggling to survive generally self-imposed poverty. He is, however, an adaptable and intriguingly free spirit, determined to liberate himself from the constraints of the material world. Wilkinson sometimes spends too much time pontificating on the significance of his subject’s actions, but he makes up for it with his deft handling of dialogue and his talent for pacing.

A disarmingly earnest portrait of an enigmatic figure.

Pub Date: March 20, 2007

ISBN: 1-4000-6543-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

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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