Two dozen beautifully crafted essays about the author’s formative years on a southern Minnesota farm explore with deft grace “what it meant to love a place and lose it.” When Meyers was 16, his father died and the family sold their farm. These lyrical, perceptive essays explore that “double loss.” Though he hasn’t farmed since, Meyers (who teaches writing at Black Hills State University in South Dakota) was inexorably shaped by the close-knit world of family, work, and land he knew as a boy, and by the harsh winters and wide, open prairies of Minnesota. He writes affectionately of his upbringing in a large family, but his father—a strong, quietly resolute man who provided the bulk of Meyers’s moral education—looms largest in his memory. Work is the means by which Meyers got to know him: “We didn’t sit down and have heart-to-heart talks. We fed cattle. We dug post holes.” Meyers’s great talent is his ability to look beyond the repetitious hardship and small disasters of farm life to find greater significance and meaning. In “Straightening the Hammermill,” he explains both the mechanics and the “mythic stature” of a particularly essential piece of machinery; in “Old Waters,” he describes how the backbreaking ritual of clearing rocks from the fields each spring led to an interest in glaciers and, eventually, an understanding of how the long march of geological time formed the land and the people who work it. Whether exploring the mythical components of prairie landscapes, tornadoes, and the night sky, or deconstructing the unwritten rules of community that allow his neighbors to help with the last harvest after his father’s death, Meyers writes with a sober reverence and respect for his subjects and for language. Deeply felt, strikingly perceptive, and stunningly written, The Witness of Combines resonates with the wisdom and insight of a work no less than a lifetime in the making.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8166-3104-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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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