Mr. Smith goes to NASA, then Washington, then NASA again. Decorated fighter pilot in two wars, first American to orbit the earth, US Senator, Presidential candidate, oldest man in space, it’s a wonderful life Glenn recalls in this earnest, workmanlike memoir written with Taylor (Healing Lessons, with Sidney Weaver, not reviewed). He clearly intends his amazing journey to affirm the Capraesque virtues of hard work, religion, and patriotism he learned while growing up in New Concord, Ohio. Only occasionally does he toss out hints of the flinty fighter-jock professionalism that, as surely as patriotism, pushed Glenn into space: —You believe you—re the best in the air. . . . If you don—t, you—d better find another line of work.— Glenn still resents the possibility that his anti-philandering warning to fellow Mercury astronauts (recounted with predictably more verve in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff) nixed his chances of becoming the first American in space. His accounts of his campaigns and political life, including a 24-year Senate career, flare only fitfully into life, as when he depicts his friend Bobby Kennedy. The writing achieves liftoff in two instances alone: when Glenn proudly recalls wife Annie’s humor, self-sacrifice, and fortitude in dealing with her stuttering, and when he recounts his epochal space flights. He remembers the frustrating delays that preceded his 1962 Friendship 7 mission, the beauty of sunsets seen from space, the peril posed by a defective heat shield, and the national euphoria on his return to earth. In discussing his Discovery shuttle flight 37 years later, he provides fascinating details on quantum advances achieved in space travel during the interim. Despite the simple, even pedestrian writing, Glenn’s story of how he became a throwback to the heroic age of discovery is enduringly thrilling. (16 pages b&w photographs, not seen) (Book-of- the-Month Club Main Selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-11074-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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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