by Daniel Hays & David Hays ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1995
In an account combining elements of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and a sensitivity training group, a father and son courageously voyage around the tip of South America, challenging the elements, their sailing prowess, and their capacity to get along. The elder Hays, founder and artistic director of the National Theater of the Deaf, his 24-year-old son, Daniel, and a cat named Tiger bravely sail a 25-foot boat on a 17,000 mile, 317-day adventure, navigating the fearsome Drake Passage around Cape Horn by way of the Panama Canal, the Gal†pagos Islands, and Easter Island, and emerging unscathed (save for the cat) in the south Atlantic. Written in alternating voices in ship's log form, with frequent musings on the meaning of life, death, and the father-son relationship, the terse entries mute much of the excitement inherent in such an undertaking. But the trip has its moments: As they round the Horn fighting gale-force winds and 20-foot waves, the Sparrow is momentarily flattened, and Daniel, tethered to the boat, is swept into the ocean. Most of the drama, however, is to be found in the minor power struggles between the characters themselves: Daniel, a more laid-back type, is critical of his father's dominance; David, a hard-driving parent, must admit to himself that his powers are waning, and gradually he yields captaincy of the boat to his son. These ongoing matters tend to becalm the reader in a sea of sentiment. Fortunately, the writers also comment on germane and interesting topics such as celestial navigation, boat design, and sailing techniques. The reader must care about the Hays family to be interested in this cross between a rite of passage and a sea passage, but the voyagers deserve accolades for this hazardous journey.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56512-102-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1995
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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