An admirable account of an icon of the golden age of space flight.
The troubled but ultimately redeemed life of the second man to walk on the Moon.
Beginning with the 1969 launch of Apollo 11, Aldrin (co-author: Look to the Stars, 2009, etc.) and co-author Abraham deliver a blow-by-blow account of the journey, landing and return. Readers will be amazed at the feat—achieved with archaic technology—but also recall wistfully that this was the last time that a mighty America flexed its muscles before the world and received unanimous cheers. For Aldrin, the historic mission proved to be an extremely tough act to follow. With no shortage of astronauts, he was not able to return to the Moon; he yearned to command the Air Force Academy, but superiors chose someone else. Like all driven, ambitious men, Aldrin was brutally self-critical. He had achieved his greatest ambition at the age of 39, at which point life seemed to lose its purpose. He began to suffer from depression. Emotional illness was the kiss of death to a military career in the 1970s, so he had to retire. Over the next decade depression and alcoholism overwhelmed him, destroying his marriage and limiting his efforts to forge a new career. His unsentimental account of recovery does not conceal repeated failures or the debilitating depression that still occasionally haunts him. Today Aldrin, nearing 80, remains an active public figure working to reenergize America’s faltering space program. As is the case with many memoirs by famous people without a writing background, the author describes events better than people or feelings. He clearly loves his new wife, admires the many rich and powerful people he works with and overflows with ideas for promoting space travel.
An admirable account of an icon of the golden age of space flight.Pub Date: June 23, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-46345-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 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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