When, in 1973, the Colfaxes bought 47 isolated acres in California's Redwood Mountains, they had no inkling of the challenges their rough homestead would pose. Here, they tell the fascinating story of their sojourn into ``rural self-reliance.'' Hounded out of academia because of David's radical political beliefs, the authors sought something different for themselves and their sons. With a worn-out chain saw and The Whole Earth Catalog in hand, they cleared the land and built ``Shining Moon Ranch,'' a home that would not have electricity, a telephone, or running water for years to come. Though they became well known in the 1980's for ``homeschooling'' three of their sons into Harvard, the Colfaxes' tale is one of privation and setbacks, with money a major concern. In 1975, after their firewood business proved only moderately successful, David took a teaching job in Canada. But the family hated the move and returned to California to try truck-gardening and raising livestock. Sheep, goats, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and rabbits turned out to be hard work and unpredictable charges for the boys, but eventually paid off in 4-H and county-fair prizes, and in a profitable goat-breeding venture. Here, anecdotes of the farming life are filled with mishaps (baby Garth ``helps'' by washing 50 newborn chicks with Ivory soap); false starts (in 1983, two-thirds of the goats inexplicably miscarry); dangers (the makeshift water pump catches fire and sets half the ranch ablaze); and privations (the family lives without electricity until 1984). The boys, subjected to intense media coverage (60 Minutes, The Tonight Show, etc.), have gone on to Fulbrights and high honors at Harvard, while David, who was elected to the county school board in 1985, suffered a near-fatal heart attack in 1990 while chasing a bear. The Colfaxes have quite a story to tell and do it justice in the telling. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: July 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-446-51489-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1992
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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