An intense treat for armchair adventurers and renegade backpackers. Hopefully the publisher will include a map in the...
A seasoned wilderness survivalist takes on Alaska’s backcountry in his most daring trek to date.
From a young age growing up in Oregon, fish biologist Metz was fascinated by the call of the wild, where he would “feel light-headed and in perfect tune with my body and the world around me, like I belong in the wilderness.” Uniquely attracted to Alaska, the author claims more than a dozen trips there since he was 18, when he became “instantly hooked on the place.” At 30, he began meticulously mapping out a daring hike that would take three months to complete and cover 300 miles across the Brooks Range, an exceptionally remote, mountainous passage “that shifts dangers with the extreme change in seasons.” The area has only been traversed by a handful of hardcore explorers, so Metz planned to stay close to villages to replenish food supplies and then educated himself on the severe weather conditions as well as troubleshooting chance encounters with moose, wolves, bears and the “excruciating loneliness and hours of physical exertion.” Along with his two Airedale terriers, Jimmy and Will, the author left Oregon by plane in late March 2007 and headed for his Northwest coastal starting point of Kotzebue, Alaska, where previously mailed boxes of food and clothing awaited him in ten-degree weather. Metz delivers a spectacularly descriptive travelogue by way of chronological journal entries. With 200 pounds of cargo in tow, Metz travelled via dog-pulled skis, a method called “skijoring,” and he braved howling winds and numbing subzero temperatures, longed for girlfriend Julie and revisited bittersweet memories of his former canine traveling companion, Jonny. Depleting reserves of food and fatigue, as well as a tumble into an icy river, threatened his resolve, but the author’s ordeal remains a dazzling, grueling experience.
An intense treat for armchair adventurers and renegade backpackers. Hopefully the publisher will include a map in the finished book.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3139-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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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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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