An absorbing account of courage, ambition, and early success—followed by a swift decline into desperation and tragedy.
A moving pop biography of the first man to swim the English Channel, by former BBC radio producer Watson.
At 26, Captain Matthew Webb (1848–83) achieved what had been thought to be impossible. His 21-hour swim across the English Channel instantly earned him the status of a national hero, hailed by the press as “half man half fish.” Dazzled by his newfound celebrity, Webb resigned his commission with the Merchant Navy (where he had served with distinction since he was 12) and tried to earn his living as a professional swimmer. The monotonous spectacle of long-distance swimming, however, would not draw a crowd for long. His ensuing challenges—which he claimed were in the interest of advancing the sport of swimming—never matched the popularity of his channel crossing and became increasingly humiliating as Webb sought in vain to outdo himself. In America, he lost a race to his archrival Paul Boyton, who had crossed the channel two months before him in a bizarre life-preserving suit that allowed its wearer to fire warning flares and smoke cigars while rowing to safety. Eventually Webb returned to England, dropped the pretense of advancing the sport, and freely admitted that he was swimming only for money. His later feats (such as a river race in near-freezing water and a 60-hour swim in an aquarium) came to resemble freak shows, and they drew few spectators and little money. Webb reached the sad culmination of his career in the Niagara River, where he died during an insane attempt to swim the rapids above the falls. He left a wife and child behind.
An absorbing account of courage, ambition, and early success—followed by a swift decline into desperation and tragedy.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2001
ISBN: 1-58542-109-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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