A fascinating anthropology lesson, delivered with the bonus of a dramatic adventure and a happy ending.
In 1944, seven Americans bailed out of their crippled bomber over the Borneo jungle, where local tribespeople hid them from the Japanese.
Heimann (The Most Offending Soul Alive: Tom Harrisson and His Remarkable Life, 1999, etc.) lived in Borneo and speaks Indonesian; few writers could have tracked down this captivating story. She paints a vivid picture of the indigenous people who comfortably inhabited the dense jungle and carried on a flourishing trade with the coast. Despite the title, they were former headhunters. Some were Christian—it depended on the village headman; if he converted, everyone followed—but they retained most of their ancient culture. The Japanese, who had conquered Borneo in 1942, paid little attention to the interior. Starving and sick after only a few days in the jungle, the airmen followed their tribal rescuers to villages where they were cared for. Everyone knew the terrible consequences of protecting downed airmen; the Japanese were searching hard for them and would surely kill not just the Americans but anyone who had helped them. But the risk seemed small in this remote area, and everyone agreed to keep quiet. Learning of the airmen, the local Japanese commander sent armed patrols into the jungle, but native guides led them astray. Aware they were not getting cooperation, the Japanese grew increasingly abusive, finally provoking the tribespeople to kill them. After four months, Australian special forces parachuted in to organize resistance to the Japanese, but two more months passed before a space was cleared for an airfield, and the airmen were able to fly out.
A fascinating anthropology lesson, delivered with the bonus of a dramatic adventure and a happy ending.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-15-101434-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
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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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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