A genuine and refreshing nature memoir.
In his debut memoir, a British journalist and copywriter tells the story of how outdoor swimming helped him cope with anxiety.
Minihane had glamorous dreams of becoming a journalist and travel writer, but as he approached 30, he found himself churning out copy about “phones, game consoles and speakers” instead. Even worse, the anxiety that had trailed him since graduate school had become a permanent feature of his life that he hid from everyone, including his wife. Temporary relief came only through swimming, so he swam “to fix myself, to cure myself and to make myself a better person in my own eyes.” In researching different places to partake of his “remedy,” the author came across the work of naturalist Roger Deakin, who had undertaken a journey across the British countryside to indulge his passion for swimming wild. Inspired, Minihane decided he would honor the late naturalist by following in his wake. He began his quest at a London public facility that he disliked for the way it had been transformed into a “commodity” rather than something that served the “well-being of society.” His first taste of the addictive headiness of a wild swim came with his experience in the River Granta. “Despite succumbing to extreme shivers,” he writes, “I was on a soaring high.” The inertia that had crippled him fell away as he eagerly anticipated each new adventure, which took him all over England and Scotland and helped him reconnect with old friends. When he accidentally broke his wrist and had to stop swimming, Minihane’s adventure ground to a halt and his anxiety returned. He sought therapy, which eventually became “like the swims I had enjoyed.” With expectations newly revised, the author resumed his watery journey, which had finally become his own. Detailed and searching, the book chronicles one man’s search for inner peace while reaffirming the calming power of the natural world.
A genuine and refreshing nature memoir.Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4683-1492-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
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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