Highly readable, educational and entertaining.
A San Diego family’s adventure-filled, two-year journey from New York to the South Pacific in a 55-foot catamaran sailboat.
Along the way, the Silverwoods endured close encounters with modern-day pirates of the Caribbean, a Force-10 gale off Colombia, a broken generator in Tahiti and every kind of sea creature imaginable. In many ways, the children—Ben, 16, Amelia, 14, Jack, nine, and Camille, five—proved more resilient than their parents. John, an alcoholic, suffered several tumbles from the wagon early on, causing his admittedly high-strung wife Jean to nearly pack up the kids and leave. He soon righted himself, aided by some hastily arranged tropical AA meetings, and Jean was eventually calmed by daily runs on the beach and the companionship of a chance-met South African family making a similar round-the-world voyage. The Silverwoods’ courage and survival skills got their ultimate test when the Emerald Jane crashed into a hidden reef in the remote South Pacific, destroying the boat and severely damaging John’s leg. In this life-and-death trial, all of them were changed, brought together as few families ever are. The first-time authors prove able narrators and engaging hosts throughout this well-crafted memoir. Wisely, they focus not only on the natural wonders experienced on their marathon journey, but on the small everyday matters: meal preparations, the kids’ home schooling at sea, mechanical problems with the boat. These up-close, authentic details enrich a story that works on many levels—as intimate family portrait, colorful travelogue and high-seas drama. Moreover, the Silverwoods wrecked on the same reef where a three-masted sailing ship, the Julia Ann, was struck back in 1855, thus providing them with a riveting historical coda to their own adventure.
Highly readable, educational and entertaining.Pub Date: July 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6655-1
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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