A life intriguingly lived is engagingly recounted for today’s generation.
A patriarch reminisces about the astonishing lifestyle changes observed during the last century in this debut autobiography.
Ira I. Boggs began his life in West Virginia. Born into a large clan of meager circumstances, he was educated in a one-room schoolhouse and helped till the family’s farmland: “In those days, children, women, and everybody worked with a hoe, an ax, or other tools—a horse and plow or an ox and plow.” Never shying away from hard work, he helped his family clear dense fields of lumber to add farmland. In 1917, he volunteered for the Army and fought in World War I. He avoided direct conflict but was exposed to the influenza pandemic. Upon his return, he worked in drilling, which took him to Texas and then California. The moderate California climate suited his fragile health, but he missed his home state. By the 1930s, he had returned to West Virginia to resettle near his family. He married, built his own home, and eventually had 11 children whom he provided for with a successful career in engineering. Over his lifetime, he witnessed a great change in technology, from planting fields barefoot to removing fuel from the earth. He survived epic clashes and even fought in a World War. In the end, it was the beauty and comforts of home that called him back to where he began. The book—written with debut author Dallas E. Boggs, Ira’s son—is a captivating glimpse of another time, offering perspectives and insights into an era when large families cultivated the land and were able to provide for themselves with a minimal amount of store-bought goods. Detailed descriptions of seasonal activities, such as putting up winter stores or rendering soap from pig carcasses, deftly document a fading knowledge and expertise. As a Boggs family chronicle, it is sure to be cherished by future generations of the clan. For mainstream audiences, the enjoyable book would improve through tightening the text and offering a more linear timeline. A few photographs are included, but the addition of a family genealogy and maps would aid readers.
A life intriguingly lived is engagingly recounted for today’s generation.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-68118-788-4
Page Count: 309
Publisher: Tate Publishing & Enterprises, LLC
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2019
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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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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