by Buzz Aldrin with Ken Abraham ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 5, 2016
A retread of old material repackaged as an inspirational guidebook. Though aiming to inspire readers of all ages, this will...
The astronaut recounts life lessons learned from his historic Apollo 11 moonwalk in 1969 and beyond.
In this rambling, loosely structured, and frequently awkward hybrid of memoir and motivational self-help guide, Aldrin (Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration, 2013, etc.) treads heavily on familiar ground touched on extensively in other accounts of the moon mission, such as First on the Moon (1970), co-authored with fellow astronauts Neil Armstrong and Michael Collins, and Aldrin’s own previous memoirs, also relating to the Apollo 11 mission and his later struggles with alcoholism and depression. Aldrin attempts to shed light on some of the lessons he learned along the way. The author focuses each chapter on an inspirational message—e.g., “Keep your mind open to possibilities,” “Maintain your spirit of adventure,” “Keep a young mind-set at every age.” The message is sometimes disjointed. In “Second Comes Right After First,” Aldrin initially tells of how he came to embrace being the second man to step foot on the moon, following Armstrong, yet he spends much of the chapter asserting his claims for having been “first” in other areas of space exploration. Though the author has remained a dedicated and forceful advocate for the United States to continue planetary exploration, generously participating in fundraisers and providing educational support whenever needed, he has also increasingly applied his celebrity status to numerous guest appearances on TV shows such as 30 Rock, The Big Bang Theory, and The Simpsons and as a contestant on Dancing with the Stars. A few of his lessons boast of these appearances and his ability to successfully mix with the various talent.
A retread of old material repackaged as an inspirational guidebook. Though aiming to inspire readers of all ages, this will likely appeal to an older readership and devoted fans of Aldrin.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4262-1649-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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