Wisdom that spans time and place, from an author perfectly suited to dispense it.
A dairy-farmer-turned-successful-entrepreneur writes to his descendants about lessons learned in life and business.
Krebs has a deep appreciation for the teachings of his ancestors. Time-tested on harsh Wisconsin farms, these dictums guided him from the barn to the boardroom, their wisdom never wavering whether the project at hand was a stroll through a junkyard or the leadership of a corporate team. Filled with inimitable advice on teamwork, problem solving and loyalty, Krebs’ book ably relates how working on a threshing crew or as part of a barn raising informs a successful voyage in all facets of life—and is actually more illuminating than what can be learned at corporate seminars. He breaks his chapters down into sections with practical headings such as “Always Dress for the Job,” “The Need for a Positive Outcome Creates Courage” and “Americans Should Buy American.” Toward the end of the text, in the midst of a touching final chapter, the central metaphor of the book is defined—a barn is a place of shelter and comfort, but the real reward is not the barn itself, rather it’s the lessons and relationships that are forged in the building process. The simple, self-effacing text and the lessons gleaned from his relatives and from his career as a communications entrepreneur amount to a love letter to his family, past and future (superficially aimed at general readers, Krebs acknowledges that his book is truly intended for his grandchildren and their children). Thus, this book may not appeal to all readers, particularly those who have no interest in 19th and 20th century farming practices. But for Krebs’ descendants, it will be a wonderful treat from a thoughtful relative.
Wisdom that spans time and place, from an author perfectly suited to dispense it.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-1456380960
Page Count: 238
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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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