The picaresque life of a seagoing vagabond, a fascinating tale told with remarkable insouciance by the wanderer himself. Moitessier (The Long Way, 1974) starts this autobiography (published posthumously) at the beginning, with his early years (late 1920s to 1940s) in Indochina. He does a beautiful job of conjuring ``that teeming anthill called Saigon.'' There's a sensuousness to his recollections that makes the town palpable: the smell of foods, sounds of the street, the foreignness of it all. He brings the same touch to the rest of his audacious doingssailing his junk about the Indian Ocean, where he is constantly under suspicion by the authorities for being an agent provocateur, or a smuggler, or a gun-runner; imprisoned for what amounts to sedition under the Japanese occupation of Vietnam. He fled Southeast Asia for the great oceanic expanses and never looked back. He proceeds to set a host of small-vessel sailing recordsat one point under sail for more than 37,000 miles without touching landthen cranks out bestselling accounts of each voyage. He eschews the monetary windfall; to take it would betray the spirit of the sea that gave him such pleasure. He settles for a while on a remote atoll in the Tuamotus (ingeniously pioneering agricultural techniques, controlling mosquitoes, battling ratsgaining the honorific Tamata, which means ``you can do it'' in the local Polynesian language), then it's off to California to put together a few dollars to continue his peregrinations. Finally to France, there to battle canceran encounter that ultimately gives him a one-way ticket to Davy Jones's locker. Risk-taker, romantic, holistic environmental philosopher (his ``alliance'' with nature), biodynamic horticulturalist, husband and father and national hero, and a fine writer to boota character who brought brio and dash to all he undertook. (50 b&w and 35 color photos, maps, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-924486-77-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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