A charmingly eccentric but meandering autobiography.
An engineer recounts his many professional pursuits and philosophical peregrinations in this debut memoir.
Growing up in Britain, Quinn showed an early interest in mechanics. He loved working on engines with his father, first drove a vehicle when he was 12 years old, and enthusiastically received a motorcycle on his 16th birthday. He graduated from Erith Technical School in 1960 when he was 17, and would eventually become a successful engineer and design the Panavia Tornado engine—hence his nickname, “The White Tornado.” Even his hobbies seemed inspired by his mechanical bent—he was a motorsport competitor for 13 years and a hang glider for 2. But Quinn was also an avid Gilbert and Sullivan enthusiast, and for years belonged to an amateur club that performed their works. The author’s remembrance is an unusually impersonal one—the bulk of it is devoted to a discussion of his engineering projects conveyed in forbiddingly technical language likely to confuse all but trained professionals in his field. Quinn explains his views on a wide range of topics—memory, evolution, Brexit, nuclear disarmament—and includes a proposal for a new British constitution as well as suggestions he made to the Olympic Games Organization. He also supplies a philosophical manifesto of his humanist ideals, which boil down to a commitment to secular rationality. The book can be delightfully quirky—at one point, he guilelessly asks the reader, “Incidentally, have you ever worked out how quick the reactions of pigeons and other formation flying birds are?” But he has remarkably little to say about his personal life; for example, his wife of over 40 years is mentioned in passing, but he presents readers with the square root of three to 5,010 digits (it goes on for pages). Apparently a portent of what’s to come, Quinn uses his curriculum vitae as the introductory chapter. The author is an impressively intelligent man, but this recollection reads like a private record designed for his own perusal.
A charmingly eccentric but meandering autobiography.Pub Date: April 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5434-8970-5
Page Count: 282
Publisher: XlibrisUK
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2018
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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