Well short of definitive, but an entertaining summary of Cousteau’s life and career.
A warm biography of one of the icons of the environmental movement.
Matsen (Titanic’s Last Secrets, 2008, etc.) begins with the party where, as a young naval officer in 1936, Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) met Simone Melchior, the admiral’s daughter who became the mother figure for the crew of Cousteau’s famed vessel, the Calypso. Cousteau arrived at the party with a movie camera, filming everything and instantly bewitching Simone. Matsen then shifts to Cousteau’s rather odd childhood. Raised partly in France, partly in America, he was the second son of a man who worked as factotum for a millionaire American playboy. Lonely and rebellious as a child, Cousteau discovered a passion for film at a time when the medium was in its infancy. Barred by injuries from his chosen career as a naval aviator, he began swimming in the sea to rebuild the strength in his arms—and discovered a new world. Almost everything else in his life grew out of that discovery. During World War II, in between espionage missions for the Resistance, Cousteau conducted experiments in underwater photography. After the war, he perfected the Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA), allowing him unprecedented freedom of movement underwater. His first glimpses of the undersea world, in a short film documenting shipwrecks, took the cinema world by storm. Cousteau sure-handedly built that success into an undersea empire, finding backers, acquiring and fitting out the Calypso, traveling the world’s oceans to create new films and developing new technology to allow even more spectacular diving feats. Matsen sketches the broad outlines of his career, but the inner Cousteau—by all accounts an intensely private man—never really emerges. In between accounts of the voyages, honors and growing environmental advocacy, we learn of family feuds, tragedies and Cousteau’s long-term affair with Francine Triplet, whom he married shortly after Simone’s death. Unfortunately, few of his close companions or family members appear in these pages, and those who do share little to reveal the man behind the mask.
Well short of definitive, but an entertaining summary of Cousteau’s life and career.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-42413-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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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