A powerful evocation of a vanishing way of life.
A portrait of one of the last subsistence trapper/hunters in Alaska.
Journalist Campbell spent parts of two years living with and observing his cousin Heimo Korth, Heimo’s Eskimo wife Edna, and their two teenage daughters in their cabin hundreds of miles from civilization. Born in 1955, Heimo spent his boyhood years in Wisconsin. Realizing that he didn’t fit into his father’s blue-collar world, Heimo moved to Alaska, planning to live off the land. Like many others who made that move, he barely survived his first exposure to the far north. Campbell vividly depicts the hazards of a world in which temperatures can run 40 below zero—on a good day—and even the slightest mistake can kill a man. Mentored by an older trapper and by native Alaskans who taught him wilderness skills, Heimo gradually began to make a living selling the pelts of wolves, martens, wolverines, and other animals he trapped. He learned to bring down a moose or caribou with a single shot, butcher it in the field, and carry the meat to his hand-built cabin. Every member of the Korth family contributed to their support, with the two girls becoming as adept at wilderness skills as their father. But by the time Campbell visited them, the lure of the modern world was making itself felt. Heimo’s daughters longed for the “normal” life with friends their own age that they experienced when the Korths spent part of the year in town. Alaska was changing, and now Heimo could barely earn enough from his trapping to sustain his family’s lifestyle, into which modern devices such as cell phones and computers began to creep. Heimo’s endurance and courage are admirable, and Campbell does his best to portray them in a way that even citified readers can appreciate.
A powerful evocation of a vanishing way of life.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-5313-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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