An intelligent biography of a quixotic American who spent his life among the villagers and pygmies of the Ituri Forest in the Belgian Congo (now Zaire). Scion of a long line of Boston Brahmins, Patrick Tracy Lowell Putnam (19041953) first became attracted to Africa during his undergraduate days at Harvard; the spell lasted through 25 years, one world war, three American wives, and a handful of African ones. Heedless of the dangers posed by his adopted country, repeatedly bailed out by his father, Putnam was an odd combination of dilettante and expert. His knowledge of pygmy culture and lifestyle was encyclopedic, but he never managed to publish anything more substantial than a New Yorker article. After stints as an explorer and agent sanitaire for the Congo Red Cross, he settled on the Epulu River and established Camp Putnam with his first American wife. He imagined an African ``dude- plantation,'' where visitors could enjoy the luxuries of civilization while hunting, observing pygmy demonstrations, and photographing exotic wildlife in the middle of the jungle. Eventually the camp, including a medical clinic, became a small village of workers and two pygmy bands, a peculiar hybrid utopia under Putnam's benevolent dictatorship. His specialized knowledge was sought by many, but he never found the discipline to become a leader in his field. A degenerative lung disease tied him to a wheelchair, and in the last years of his life he became a frightening tyrant in his little kingdom. Mark (History of Anthropology/Peabody Museum, Harvard Univ.; A Stranger in Her Native Land, 1989) illuminates the bizarre life of a man whose career stretched from the days of gentleman ethnographers to the eve of independence in colonial Africa. One of those rare books that may send you to the library for more on the subject.
Pub Date: March 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-8032-3182-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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