by Holly Bailey ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2015
Storm chasers will find thrills in this tale of nature’s wrath.
Tracking a furious, lethal storm.
In her debut nonfiction book, Yahoo News correspondent Bailey, a former White House correspondent for Newsweek, gives a tense recounting of the devastating tornado that struck her hometown of Moore, Oklahoma, on May 20, 2013. Central Oklahoma is called “tornado alley” because of the frequency and severity of twisters that tear through the region, but after five tornadoes struck Moore in 15 years, that town earned an epithet as “the tornado alley of tornado alley.” As in many disaster books, we first meet the major players: Gary England, a trusted TV weather forecaster aiming to tamp down sensationalism; his feisty rival Mike Morgan; their young counterpart, Damon Lane, newly hired at another station; a National Weather Service forecaster; the principal of an elementary school directly in the twister’s path; Moore’s city manager; and many others. Nail-biting chronology drives the plot, which lags a bit when characters’ worries repeat in chapter after chapter. Tornadoes are mysterious weather phenomena, Bailey learned, that only recently have become somewhat predictable. In Oklahoma, the base ingredients—a collision of warm and cool fronts—are particularly volatile: “Intensely moist air from the Gulf of Mexico will often collide with cool, dry air wafting down from Canada over the Rockies, and the two forces are further churned together by the jet stream.” When temperatures or moisture levels vary significantly, a supercell may—or may not—form, generating a tornado. A mile wide, with winds over 200 miles per hour, the May 20 tornado began “as nothing more than a wispy little funnel, dancing shyly between the clouds and the ground”; within minutes, it “morphed into a hulking beast devouring everything in its path”: houses, trucks, electrical wires, even grass. Though occasionally overheated, Bailey’s prose vividly evokes the tornado’s power and menace.
Storm chasers will find thrills in this tale of nature’s wrath.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-525-42749-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
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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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