by Elmer Kelton ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2007
“The word ‘cowboy’ has taken on negative connotations in recent times,” writes Kelton wryly, “especially in a political or...
Charming memoir of renowned western novelist Kelton’s (Texas Showdown, not reviewed) early years in the saddle, at the desk and in the trench.
The author’s querencia—the word means something like the place where a person is most at home—is at the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, “a ranch in Crane and Upton counties, just east of the Pecos River.” Kelton, born in 1926, found his life work not only as a novelist of daily life in the rural West (“My characters,” he writes, “are five-eight and nervous”) but also as an agricultural journalist of high standing. To arrive there, as he relates, he had to live the tough life of the cowhand, his parents bound by inclination and custom to a part of the country that could be unforgiving and ungenerous for years at a time, but then surprise with a bountiful harvest. His father was part of the “last full-time horseback cowboy generation,” and if he himself learned how to get around on a horse and throw a lasso, Kelton (and his father) soon recognized that he was better suited to something other than cowboying. With another querencia in books such as Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and the collected works of Zane Grey, Kelton came of age aspiring to be a writer—and found his Depression-scarred father wholly in support, if a little worried about how the boy would make a living. Kelton’s memoir then moves in rapid succession from ranch to university, and just as quickly into combat, describing his service as a foot soldier during World War II and courtship of a young Austrian widow whom he would take home to Texas, to considerable culture shock on both sides.
“The word ‘cowboy’ has taken on negative connotations in recent times,” writes Kelton wryly, “especially in a political or military context.” This memoir helps restore what to westerners is an honorable term, and it’s a pleasure through and through.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-765-31521-1
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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