At journey's end, a failed moral compass.
The coauthors of several works on Will Rogers (A Will Rogers Treasury, not reviewed, etc.) now turn their attention to the man who flew him to his death: famed and, in their estimation, deeply flawed aviator Wiley Post.
Even airplane buffs who can recite chapter and verse on Lindbergh's singular adventure are unlikely to remember much about the overshadowed Post (1899–1935) apart from his untimely end, so this recounting may be revealing, if hardly suspenseful, to many. Post set and later broke his own record for solo circumnavigation, tested the first pressurized suit at the edge of the stratosphere, and was probably the first pilot to deliberately hitch a ride on what would later be known as the Jet Stream. An expansive font of data (thanks to an older brother's autobiography) on the Post family's hardscrabble farm-country peregrinations in Texas prior to Wiley's birth keeps readers waiting overlong for his early barnstorming adventures. Still, this narrative does establish a certain wistfulness about the withdrawn, undereducated tinkerer who bootstrapped himself out of the Dust Bowl and onto Page One in the 1930s. Post packed his host of aviation milestones into a scant ten-year career, a particularly astounding accomplishment since he had no depth perception due to the loss of his left eye in an accident at age 26. The Sterlings imply with insight that the same willfulness with which Post neutralized this handicap could also have led to his fatal crash. Their treatment of aeronautical detail seems sometimes simplistic, but they exhaustively document a cumulative pattern of impatience, annoyance with details, rule-fudging, corner-cutting, and, ultimately, lack of integrity that led directly to the August day in 1935 near Point Barrow, Alaska, when Post refused to play it safe for the last time—and took Rogers down with him.
At journey's end, a failed moral compass.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0894-8
Page Count: 356
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
