For Dombrowski, the “scarcely edible” bonefish, which he releases within seconds of catching them, are valuable simply...
A poet and Montana-based fly-fishing guide recounts his trip to the Bahamas, where he met an aging guide who taught him about fish and life.
In a lyrical if sometimes-overblown account, Dombrowski (Earth Again: Poems, 2013, etc.) loosely links reflections on his experiences catching and releasing bonefish, the history and geography of the Bahamas, the construction of fishing rods, stories he has told his children, and the difference between fishing or hunting for sport and for dinner. At the center of the book are David Pinder and his family. Pinder, retired—or forced out because cataracts restricted his sight—from the Deep Water Cay fishing lodge, where he worked for decades, still has an instinct for where fish are hiding, one he has passed down to some of his many children and grandchildren. Dombrowski regards Pinder, whose “life seems to verge on the rare heroic” and who has spent a lifetime “pursuing not only the seen but the unseen and intuited,” with reverence. He accords Pinder’s sayings—e.g., “you go looking for this, the ocean gives you that”—mythic significance. The author is fond of metaphors, some of which strain at their seams: a bonefish tail reminds him of “a loose-fitting bracelet affixed to the wrist of a beautiful woman seated at a bar,” and the sky at one point looks like “a ten-mile-wide Rothko, the canvas on loan from an archangel.” He heads each short chapter with an epigraph from the likes of Zen master Dogen and Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, which, depending on one’s point of view, either gives his angling adventures a philosophical slant or makes them sound pretentious.
For Dombrowski, the “scarcely edible” bonefish, which he releases within seconds of catching them, are valuable simply because they are so difficult to hunt down. Some may find his demanding prose equally rewarding, while others might prefer the textual equivalent of something closer to a catfish.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-57131-352-2
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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