A laudable effort that meets with mixed success.
The stage and screen actress delivers a memoir focused on her wildlife conservation work.
When she was the director of the National Endowment for the Arts in the mid-1990s, Alexander (Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics, 2000, etc.) famously butted heads with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who was attempting to eliminate support for the arts from the budget. Less well known are the author’s activities in support of the conservation of endangered species. In her second memoir, Alexander chronicles her global travels to remote areas around the world—e.g., Belize, Thailand, Bhutan, Ecuador, Newfoundland, Madagascar—in search of rare wildlife. She describes accounts of the illegal, wanton killing of rhinoceroses for their horns, which are used in traditional Chinese and Indian medicine and sell for as much as $100,000 on the black market. In Thailand, the government imports elephants to satisfy the tourist trade while, at the same time, vast networks of corrupt government officials permit the “slaughtering of tigers and other wild cats to supply the Asian trade in body parts.” Alexander couples this grim picture with enthusiastic accounts of the exotic birds and animals she has seen on her global travels, and the transitions can be jarring. She begins with a report on a 1982 trip to the still relatively undeveloped “birder’s paradise” of Belize, where, despite no sightings, she was thrilled to hear the “deep guttural cough” of a jaguar. The author also describes birding in Peru and recounts the experience of being greeted with a welcoming ceremony by New Guinean villagers in traditional costumes. While many readers will share the author’s concerns about conservation, Alexander provides few new insights into the people and places she has visited, and the narrative hops from place to place without enough connecting elements between the anecdotes.
A laudable effort that meets with mixed success.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35436-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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