A gripping tale of genuine adventures, very well told.
A straightforward biography of the first Englishman to explore northern Canada.
Toronto-based McGoogan (Fatal Passage, 2002, etc.) presents his hero as a determined adventurer. Samuel Hearne (1745–92) became a midshipman in the Royal Navy at age 12, receiving his naval training under Captain Samuel Hood, who also served as mentor to Horatio Nelson. A disciple of Voltaire, Hearne found his suspicion of authority strengthened as he witnessed naval floggings and executions. After seeing action against France in the Seven Years War, he returned to London. In 1766, he joined the Hudson’s Bay Company and was assigned to Prince of Wales Fort, the company’s northernmost outpost. From this base he was sent to search the far west for rich veins of copper ore reported by natives who traded at the fort. He also aspired to settle the question of the long-hoped-for Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific. Accompanying Matonabee, a leader of the Dene, Hearne traveled about 3,500 miles across some of the most difficult terrain in the world. McGoogan credits him with being perhaps the first Arctic explorer to adopt the natives’ methods, almost a necessity for Europeans attempting to live off the land in the frozen north. Neither the copper nor the Northwest Passage panned out; worse, Matonabee’s warriors massacred a group of Inuit near what is now known as Bloody Fall. McGoogan attempts to provide a cultural context for this and other shocking acts by the tribespeople, but the overall effect is to emphasize even more the rigors of Hearne’s journey. He later became governor of Prince of Wales Fort and was captured by French warships supporting the American Revolution. In failing health, he returned for his final years to London, where he published his journals and met the young Coleridge.
A gripping tale of genuine adventures, very well told.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1304-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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