A light, travel-going pleasure. (Line drawings throughout)
A rangy gathering of travel pieces without airs.
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for her feature writing at the Baltimore Sun, Steinbach (Without Reservations, 2000) claims modest intentions. “I wanted to study things that interested me in places that I found interesting,” she writes, to “offer a story about what I set out to learn and what I came back knowing.” The writer doesn’t expect her journeys to be travail-free, but she does like to travel in a measure of comfort, so her experiences need to be engaging enough to convince the next editor to finance her next freelance fancy. And they are: Steinbach is either a good faker, or she’s having the time of her life. She has serendipity on her side, too; she might be flummoxed in looking for a bonsai garden off a medieval street in Florence, but then she stumbles upon a rare opportunity to enter a private palazzo, which was “like opening a plain cardboard box and finding a Fabergé egg inside.” The author observes the architecture of Havana, takes a writing workshop in the Czech Republic, learns the Wakayagi style of dance in Kyoto, and studies French cooking at the Ritz, but these adventures often simply provide backgrounds for the people she meets; Steinbach has the humility to know a guide worth listening to. She basks in simple delights: “I bought a huge cup of pistachio gelato and sat eating it in the dappled shade.” Readers will admire her optimism (she carried a tube of 32 SPF sunscreen on a visit to Scotland) and enjoy her goofy humor as she describes rams—“the Scottish ones, not the Los Angeles ones”—stirring at the sight of her red windbreaker, while she walks slowly, “hoping that the color red did not have the same effect on rams as it does on bulls in Pamplona.”
A light, travel-going pleasure. (Line drawings throughout)Pub Date: April 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50441-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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