An engaging story about wealth, entitlement, property rights, change, loss, and pain.
A swift account of the history of Malibu, “a rugged ranch in the middle of nowhere” that became “a global symbol of fame and fortune.”
Reuters senior reporter Randall (Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep, 2012) is interested in briskness and conciseness; this is no dense scholarly history. He begins with a quick overview of the entire text, then proceeds with the story of Frederick Rindge (1857-1905), an ambitious Harvard student who, throughout his life, had to battle the lingering effects of rheumatic fever but shared with Theodore Roosevelt the exercise ethos and love of the outdoors that enabled him to live much longer than he otherwise might have. Rindge, as Randall shows us, had a gift for seeing financial opportunities and seizing them—though it didn’t hurt that he began with an inheritance worth some $140 million in today’s currency. He met and very quickly married Rhoda May Knight (who always went by “May”), and off they went to Los Angeles, where he quickly became one of the major movers in that community’s transition to a megalopolis. He bought a huge ranch, once a major Spanish land grant, in the area now called Malibu (an abbreviation of the ranch’s original Spanish name), developed it, and strived mightily—as did his widow, for decades—to keep it both private and pristine. Obviously, they lost. They battled homesteaders, trespassers, and, eventually, the local and national governments, the final stroke being the construction of the Pacific Coast Highway. The Depression wiped out May’s fortune. The author communicates a keen sympathy for the Rindges, praising Frederick for his philanthropy back in his Massachusetts hometown and May for her virtual monomania about the property. As “progress” arrives in the area, the author wants us to feel sorrow for the folks with multiple mansions and vast fortunes.
An engaging story about wealth, entitlement, property rights, change, loss, and pain.Pub Date: March 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-24099-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
