Seemingly covering disparate topics, Baker beautifully connects them all with an incisive, clear writing style and sharp...
A Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist takes readers on a journey through the Indian subcontinent at the closing of the British Empire.
Baker (The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, 2011, etc.) narrates the stories of geologist John Auden (1903-1991) and surveyor Michael Spender (1906-1945), who both thoroughly explored this mysterious region of the world. They worked together on a survey expedition to map K2 and the surrounding Himalayas in a time before nylon tents, fleece bedrolls, and oxygen tanks. Harboring a secret desire to conquer Mount Everest, Auden diligently studied and surveyed the mountains to learn how and why the range was formed. While he, as many, did not accept the theory of continental drift, he was the first to notice the Main Central Thrust, the fault that runs the 1,500-mile length of the Himalayas. His observations and classifications of the composition and arrangement of rocks fueled countless post–World War II projects as India modernized. Spender brought his craft of photogrammetry—making measurements from photos (aerial and otherwise)—to create topographic maps. During the war, he helped define the art of photographic interpretation. With a host of interpreters working for him, he identified Nazis amassing equipment for invasions. Refreshingly, Baker doesn’t just focus on these two remarkable men. She also engagingly discusses the men and women who explored world events with art, poetry, and prose, seeing different angles and using different tools. W.H. Auden (John’s brother), Stephen Spender (Michael’s brother), Nancy Sharp (Michael’s wife), and Chris Isherwood all helped to map the cultural landscape of that era. In India, there was Sudhin Datta, a Bengali intellectual who founded Parichay, a literary journal for men of letters, and was the host of a weekly discussion group in Calcutta.
Seemingly covering disparate topics, Baker beautifully connects them all with an incisive, clear writing style and sharp descriptions of the terrain. A book for any readers curious about India after 1900.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55597-804-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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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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