In this beautifully rendered narrative, a woman reveals the art of tracking both in the wilderness and in autobiography. Nyala became a professional tracker almost by chance. Having grown up in rural southern Mississippi, she saw her own track veer tragically off course when, at age 17, she dropped out of high school shortly before graduation to marry an abusive man. She had two children with him and many near-encounters with death before she decided, seven years later, to escape. But eluding her vicious ex-husband turned out to be even more difficult than getting up the courage to leave. Nyala and her children suddenly found themselves being tracked, and they learned to read the signs of their pursuer in the footprints around their house, in the sliding door left slightly ajar, in the neatly folded hand towels in the bathroom. They moved often, but one day Nyala's children disappeared, abducted by their father. While trying to regain custody, Nyala married a park ranger and began learning to track in earnest. She talks here about the process: finding the track, following its turns, walking alongside the person or animal you're trying to find. It's fascinating to watch her mark a lost person's footprint from among hundreds and to see her determinedly trace the progress of wandering hikers as they stray farther and farther from their goal. She tells of two tracking experiences in detail, and of the slow process of becoming a true tracker. And Nyala also tells how, in mastering this skill, she found her own true course again: She was reunited with her children, went back to college, and studied tracking at ever deeper levels among the Bushmen in Africa. The gripping chronicle of a tracker finding herself as she looks for others. (Book-of-the-Month/Quality Paperback Book Club selection)
Pub Date: June 16, 1997
ISBN: 0-8070-7092-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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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