Ultimately, Benson moans his way through the entire experience, as though he couldn’t have foreseen the punishment he would...
The story of a naïve 20-something’s monthlong 2,000-mile bike trek, a journey designed to provide some direction to his life.
First-time memoirist and Portland, Oregon-based bike enthusiast Benson tells the all-too-familiar life story of the archetypal disaffected young white male just out of college putting himself through some masochistic Pilgrim’s Progress ordeal in order to make sense of his life. In the beginning, we find Benson in the Guatemalan jungle, where he soon grew tired of the backpacker’s life and decided he needed more than just rudderless experiences abroad to have a chance at spiritual fulfillment. Consequently, he and his girlfriend, Rachel, traveled back to the United States to embark on a grueling bike journey from their native Wisconsin all the way to western Oregon. To make the trip even more difficult, they imposed a strict one-month deadline for the adventure. However, the best American road narratives are borne out of leisurely pacing, often allowing for more randomness and serendipity to take place along the road. Benson and Rachel were so busy blazing toward their destination that they missed countless opportunities to connect with their surroundings or, more importantly, with each other. What we get instead is a lot of bellyaching about gnarly headwinds, sore legs, flat tires and sweaty armpits—and not much real drama otherwise. Furthermore, the author misses nearly every chance to find humor in their situation, instead dropping the F-bomb in every other sentence like some rogue Vice magazine correspondent (“Fuck the stupid Rockies. I didn’t need them”).
Ultimately, Benson moans his way through the entire experience, as though he couldn’t have foreseen the punishment he would absorb on this colossal but spiritually empty cycling journey.Pub Date: June 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-218064-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
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
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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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