An eloquent love letter to bees.
A British naturalist offers crisp essays on her relationship with bees.
In her debut book, Howard, a devoted bee advocate, pens a lengthy, knowledgeable, and occasionally poetic tribute to honeybees, bumblebees, and other buzzy creatures. She pays attention to the much-publicized, recent dearth of bees but also focuses much of her attention on bees’ role in nature—to pollinate flowers, plants, and trees. As she notes, the author’s husband is a professional beekeeper, but this book is a personal journey about Howard falling in love with bees while in her 40s. The narrative is frequently eye-opening and profound, marked by the author’s dry wit and graceful writing. “As my interest in bees has grown,” she writes, “so has my awareness of everything that surrounds them or connects them to the web of life they exist within. I feel as though I have embarked on a never-ending journey, a journey that spirals continuously outwards, gathering momentum and taking on a life of its own as it sweeps up all the wondrous, wild things that fly, swim, walk, or crawl in its wake….If I could draw the route of my journey, I suspect it might look a little like a spider’s web, dotted here and there with treasures.” Howard also provides a nice balance between the very real science of studying bees and their function in nature and her cleareyed and eloquent observations about the natural world. Because of that balance, what might have sounded like a dry lecture turns into something far more interesting. Whether she’s explaining how different bee species are classified, describing her mother’s deteriorating health (and eventual death), or simply ruminating on the beauty around her, Howard creates a text that is compelling and worth your time even if you’re not a fellow bee advocate.
An eloquent love letter to bees.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60358-848-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chelsea Green
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
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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