Eloquent meditations on fishing interlaced with piercing explorations of the inner workings of the newspaper business.
The New York Times’ former executive editor, fired in the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, ruminates on fly-fishing, love, successes and failures in the newspaper game, and hooking and fighting and losing a marlin.
Raines, who has written on Fishing-and-Life before (Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, 1993), describes fishing here as “the pursuit of the unpredictable.” Woven in among the fish tales are stories about his boyhood, his career in journalism and the courtship of his second wife, which ended his years as “a romantic freelancer.” Raines also tosses off asides on everything from baseball to the Bushes. Whether writing about fishing near Christmas Island or in Russia, he always returns to issues of pain, gain and loss, probity and mendaciousness, friendship and love. Raines comes across as self-deprecating and learned, fierce and confident; his writing is as brisk and bracing as the early-morning air on a remote salmon stream. The Blair episode, which dominates the memoir’s last third, eats at him. He says he never saw the memos and e-mails from others wondering about the young reporter, never was part of the decisions that led to Blair’s surprising promotion. When the scandal broke, Raines was determined to put the whole story before the Times’ readers—and was bemused when some of the fingers pointed his way. His critics declared that what he didn’t know he should have known. And so on.
Eloquent meditations on fishing interlaced with piercing explorations of the inner workings of the newspaper business.Pub Date: May 2, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-7278-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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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