Warm, funny, with a touch of suspense, this adventure will delight anyone who’s sought an illusive prize.
An aviation enthusiast travels to Russia in search of World War II fighter planes and discovers, not unsurprisingly, that nothing in Russia comes easy.
Intrigued by German aircraft since childhood, the author dreams of acquiring a rare WWII German fighter plane. Twenty-one years later, he receives a call about some warbirds in a far corner of Siberia. He goes to work immediately wrangling business partners and investors for what will undoubtedly be an expensive trip. His boss/friend becomes his partner, and the two begin the difficult task of planning the excursion. They field strange and frustrating requests from middlemen, including a gentleman called the Admiral who expects $10,000 to guarantee their safety in an area he purports to control. As they come to learn, greasing palms is the only way to get things done in Russia. So begins Page’s treacherous and often hysterical journey, where everything, including information on where to get a cup of coffee, costs. The pilots who fly them are sometimes drunk, van drivers and their owners request extra payments mid-ride, extortionists hound them on the street–everyone wants something from the Americanskis, as they are haplessly shuttled from one aircraft graveyard to another, where planes beyond repair are offered at extraordinary prices. They even acquire a KGB tail. It’s not until a second trip, this time to St. Petersburg, that the men find a decent treasure, a Messerschmitt Bf109 German fighter. Requests for cash continue to pour in, and Page risks dipping into his own pockets to get the plane to his Denver warehouse. While the story doesn’t paint a pretty picture of Russia and its citizens, the author’s recollections are jaunty, and his eye for humor and the absurd keep the toilsome story upbeat. Historians, aircraft enthusiasts and adventurers will appreciate this impassioned hunt for his beloved craft.
Warm, funny, with a touch of suspense, this adventure will delight anyone who’s sought an illusive prize.Pub Date: April 18, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-58348-487-6
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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