Moore’s madcap vibrancy and zest for outdoor life permeate this unpretentious chronicle.
The NESN/ESPN personality chronicles his rise from penury to the big (well, bigger) time as host of two top-rated fishing programs.
Moore and his four siblings were raised in rural Massachusetts by a doting mother and a competitive, Civil War–obsessed father. (Family vacations were spent touring historic battlefields.) Exuberant and acquisitive from an early age, young Charlie owned a brand-new Corvette at 18 and married high-school sweetheart Angela at 20. Virtually broke, the couple temporarily moved in with Angela’s parents…and stayed several years. With two kids and another on the way, Moore was bounced by his father from the family cigar store and tried unsuccessfully to open a bait shop. At this lowest of low points, he put his “people person” skills to good use and pitched himself as a fishing expert to the brass at New England Sports Network (NESN). They gave him a biweekly five-minute segment on the sports magazine show Front Row, and after some rather wooden initial performances he eventually warmed up enough to let his natural comedic panache, vast knowledge and genuine love of freshwater fishing shine through on camera. He got his own NESN show, Charlie Moore Outdoors, then moved to ESPN for the competition-themed Beat Charlie Moore. Initial reaction to the latter was mixed—Moore’s in-your-face personality wasn’t to everyone’s taste—but visits from a slew of sports and rock celebrities (and a cameo by Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney) beefed up ratings. As well as tracing his personal journey, the dedicated family man imparts sage wisdom on preserving domestic bliss and achieving success (tenacity in both cases). He also catalogues the best ways to cast a line, favorite fishing spots and the contents of his tackle box. The author’s crowning glory, he claims, was being inducted into the New England Sports Museum.
Moore’s madcap vibrancy and zest for outdoor life permeate this unpretentious chronicle.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37472-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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