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.
Atlanticsenior 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
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier...
A moving record of Didion’s effort to survive the death of her husband and the near-fatal illness of her only daughter.
In late December 2003, Didion (Where I Was From, 2003, etc.) saw her daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne, hospitalized with a severe case of pneumonia, the lingering effects of which would threaten the young woman’s life for several months to come. As her daughter struggled in a New York ICU, Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, suffered a massive heart attack and died on the night of December 30, 2003. For 40 years, Didion and Dunne shared their lives and work in a marriage of remarkable intimacy and endurance. In the wake of Dunne’s death, Didion found herself unable to accept her loss. By “magical thinking,” Didion refers to the ruses of self-deception through which the bereaved seek to shield themselves from grief—being unwilling, for example, to donate a dead husband’s clothes because of the tacit awareness that it would mean acknowledging his final departure. As a poignant and ultimately doomed effort to deny reality through fiction, that magical thinking has much in common with the delusions Didion has chronicled in her several previous collections of essays. But perhaps because it is a work of such intense personal emotion, this memoir lacks the mordant bite of her earlier work. In the classics Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968) and The White Album (1979), Didion linked her personal anxieties to her withering dissection of a misguided culture prey to its own self-gratifying fantasies. This latest work concentrates almost entirely on the author’s personal suffering and confusion—even her husband and daughter make but fleeting appearances—without connecting them to the larger public delusions that have been her special terrain.
A potent depiction of grief, but also a book lacking the originality and acerbic prose that distinguished Didion’s earlier writing.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4314-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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