A shrewd meditation on home, family, nature, and the author’s native South.
An ornithologist writes about himself as a member of a rare and perhaps endangered species: the African-American birder.
Lanham (Wildlife Ecology/Clemson Univ.) describes himself as “an unusually colored fish out of water,” as someone who doesn’t “fit the common calculus.” He describes his upbringing in the rural South in a rapturous way that shows how nature became his religion, but he also knows why many of his race associate the land with harsher memories, backbreaking labor, and being treated as less than equal or even human. As he traces his singular path from the family homestead through higher education—he switched majors from engineering to zoology and lost his scholarship—Lanham occasionally succumbs to an excess of literary flourish and a penchant for alliteration in particular. In the space of less than five pages, he writes of “the sylvan savior of southern soil,” “the priceless places where nature hangs by tooth, talon, and tendril,” and “something furred, feathered, finned, or scaled that scurried, swam, or flew.” Yet when the published poet gives way to the memoirist, his experiences require no flowery expression. Perhaps the most powerfully provocative chapter is “Birding While Black,” which begins, “it’s only 8:38 a.m. and I think I might get hanged today.” Apparently, a lone black man with binoculars arouses suspicion in neighborhoods where Confederate flags abound. The author is also illuminating on what some might see as the contradiction in values between his passions for birding and hunting, in what he calls “my transition from a wine-drinking, cheese-eating ecologist to a beer-swilling, venison-chewing wildlife biologist.” Ultimately, he brings the memoir full circle in a search for roots that expand his sense of identity, as the home he once knew is not what it was but remains forever in his memory and his heart.
A shrewd meditation on home, family, nature, and the author’s native South.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-57131-315-7
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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