Travel dispatches that offer a rare perspective on a world few see so intimately.
Intrepid travelers offer a colorful report on far-flung destinations.
Retired lawyers James and Grossman share an insatiable desire to travel, especially to isolated, sometimes-dangerous places where most tourists fear to go. Drawing on James’ journals, Grossman’s photographs, and their memories, they recount 10 memorable trips to remote sites in countries such as Mali, Ethiopia, Iran, and Algeria. The tone is calmly matter-of-fact even when the author is describing harrowing events: a mother rhino ready to charge in Nepal; a siege of tiny, vicious black ants in Cameroon; stingrays off the coast of Venezuela, where the minuscule puri puri burrowed through mosquito netting and left enough bite marks on James’ leg “to form a dragon tattoo.” Trekking in Nepal, Grossman fell and dislocated her elbow, requiring a helicopter flight to a hospital in Kathmandu where the elbow was painfully reset. But the incident hardly fazed them, and they soon finished their Nepal trip at Chitwan National Park. In Venezuela, James twice became so dehydrated that he needed a saline drip. Rudimentary habitations, mostly lacking plumbing, were part of the adventure. For the most part, they were welcomed warmly in the indigenous communities they visited, sometimes with celebratory rituals. Among the Baka, in Cameroon, after two hours of dances, songs, and games, the villagers sang the couple a song wishing them pleasant dreams. Even in Iran, where they visited in 2008, they were greeted with smiles. The travelers are deeply respectful of the people and cultures they encountered and applaud resistance to Westernization. The “generous, hardworking, and proud” inhabitants of Papua New Guinea, for example, “did not appear to aspire to the economic and social status of former colonists” and to change lives “that are stable, relatively healthy, and aesthetically satisfying.” Still, the authors are forthright about the political problems they observed. They came away from a visit to Gaza in 2009, part of an anti-war delegation, feeling strong support for Palestinian self-determination.
Travel dispatches that offer a rare perspective on a world few see so intimately.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-1350-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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