The bizarre life of a daredevil pioneer pilot, trained in the Wright Brothers” school, who became a visionary inventor, entrepreneur, spellbinding salesman of possibilities rather than solid achievements, showman, engineer (MIT), manipulator of trusting investors” vanishing capital, liar, and deadbeat, of whom it was said he spent more time in bankruptcy court than in church. Mansfield (In the Memory House, not reviewed, etc.) attempts to bring to life a complex, extraordinary personality in rapidly changing times of developing technology. Few early pilots (1908—11) died a natural death as they sought to understand and master aerodynamics, changing winds that threatened the stability of flimsy biplanes, and temperamental engines suddenly losing power. Atwood often risked death as he learned by trial and error. To maintain a precarious living, barnstorming aviators became daring stuntmen in a circus atmosphere of cheering crowds at state fairs. The restless Atwood showed great imagination and worked many hours to gain hundreds of patents. To attract research money, he wove together truth and lies with partial successes and failures. Mansfield writes of Atwood’s wealth and poverty succeeding each other as he strove to become the Henry Ford of aviation—designing, manufacturing, and selling his product. During WWII he contributed to the famous Higgins boat, essential in invasions that helped to achieve victory. He also led a complicated private life, marrying five times and becoming an adoring yet despotic father, walking away from his children for extensive periods. Before dying at 83, Atwood had a warm reunion with his family, long scattered by geography and time. Mansfield likens Atwood to the skylark, because he had the instincts of a bird flying as high as he could in a kind of limitless space. A large slice of America’s not-well-known past and of an eccentric genius who helped develop modern aircraft. A well- researched, honest evaluation of a man and his times.
Pub Date: April 23, 1999
ISBN: 0-87451-891-1
Page Count: 324
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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