Despite his personal connection to guns, Collins is frustratingly unopinionated about the elephant in the room.
A veteran journalist recounts his upbringing within a culture of guns.
At the beginning, Collins claims that this is “not an antigun book.” However, the book is not entirely pro-gun either, as the author is careful to remain an observer without too much editorializing. Recounting his childhood in small-town Nevada, Collins portrays his affection for the rugged individualism of the Western lifestyle. He recalls his first goose hunting trip at the age of 4, making homemade fish oil by burying a trash can filled with fish for several months, and even spying on local cathouse women sunbathing topless. The other aspect of the romantic West that attracted Collins: guns. The author describes the gun as America’s “one constant companion,” and that was certainly true of his own upbringing. In particular, one hunting expedition proved an early example of the danger of guns, and it serves as the backbone of his narrative. Barely a teenager, Collins accidentally shot himself in his foot with a hunting rifle and had to endure his injury for more than eight hours as he traveled out of the wilderness to the nearest hospital. The author was lucky; had the shot entered only a fraction of an inch in the other direction, he might have lost his foot. In his remembrance, however, others were not so fortunate. Collins recalls numerous personal experiences of senseless violence caused by guns, sometimes killing and other times severely disabling. (Collins himself had another close call with a loaded shotgun he was sure he’d emptied.) At times, he tries to justify our persistent love affair with guns by claiming that “guns are part of our country’s creation myth” and providing fanciful historical anecdotes meant to contextualize the endless violence, but it’s hard to see how the author can remain so aloof and indifferent to guns and gun culture considering how intimately he has been affected by them.
Despite his personal connection to guns, Collins is frustratingly unopinionated about the elephant in the room.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4930-0385-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
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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