A superior example of Mowat’s chronicling powers, illuminating a grand Canadian region that was about to change forever.
Master wilderness storyteller Mowat (High Latitudes, 2003, etc.) spins a rousing tale of travels through the Canadian Far North during 1947, darkened a bit by forebodings about the future.
The author went to the barren lands west of Hudson Bay in the postwar period as an assistant to a scientist he immediately disliked. Mowat considered their work “little more than high-grade plundering ventures devoted to slaughtering everything non-human or non-domesticated,” and he’d had had enough of that during the war. So before long he took ill-tempered parting from the scientist and pushed off with Charles Schweder, a Metis trapper. They checked on Schweder’s lines as they roved, but mostly the pair explored parts unknown, experienced the great migration of caribou, and met native people, inland-dwelling Inuit uncorrupted by contact with the population to the south. Mowat also ran into curious pockets of white settlers and gathered their stories; he hunted for the stories of the Indians and the Metis he encountered as well. To these narratives, he brings his acute observational powers and participatory enthusiasm, which also fire his descriptions of a land of golden eskers, big spruce, clear lakes, green willow swales, freshwater seals, crashing rapids, grizzlies and ptarmigan, and, always, mosquitoes. Mowat deplores the Canadian government’s abuse of native peoples, the diseases that decimated their number, the relief supplies that never came as promised to the dislocated populations. Even the missionaries, he notes, “speculated that the native’s pagan beliefs might have brought them nearer to God than did . . . Christianity.” The author shows off skills developed over decades as he comfortably sets the scene (“I spent the best part of my childhood roaming the central Saskatchewan prairie”) and alludes to the life of roaming to come.
A superior example of Mowat’s chronicling powers, illuminating a grand Canadian region that was about to change forever.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1430-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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