A record of travels in search of something the author didn’t know he’d lost; well worth the attention of other seekers, as...
Amiable wanderings to China’s Han-shan in search of both the “cold mountain” and the poet who took his name from that wild place.
Han-shan, the Tang dynasty poet, went for hundreds of years without being much honored or remembered; indeed, we’ve lost any record, if any ever existed, of when he lived and died, his real name and other such biographical data. It was only in the 1950s and ’60s, thanks in part to accidentally simultaneous English translations by Gary Snyder and Burton Watson, that American readers discovered a corpus augmented in the 1980s by versions by Bill Porter, aka Red Pine. Lenfestey (Earth in Anger: Twenty-five Poems of Love and Despair for Planet Earth, 2013, etc.), a former academic and advertising executive, turned a couple of life crises to advantage by traveling to China to see for himself the poet’s mountain fastness and the people who live there today, including an odd assemblage of hermits, monks and expats. The journey he recounts is less philosophically charged than Porter’s Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits (1993), and the paths he took are perhaps less hair-raising than in decades past thanks to official efforts at encouraging tourism, but Lenfestey’s eye is a good, clear one, and he delivers some vivid notes on the Middle Kingdom: “The oppressive grayness tasted of dust and smoke and pollution in some ghoulish brew, but the scramble of traffic…seemed not dissimilar from that of any urban megalopolis of the late twentieth century.” The author even found an oddly gregarious hermit—and, crediting his bravery, tried her cooking—while serving up a just-right assortment of poems by the cave-dwelling poet who, even now, doesn’t get much love in his own country, even as he figures, at least in Lenfestey’s mind, as “the older brother America never had.”
A record of travels in search of something the author didn’t know he’d lost; well worth the attention of other seekers, as well as fans of Tang poetry.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-57131-346-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2014
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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