Raw-edged honesty at its most revealing and intense.
A noted African-American journalist’s account of his hardscrabble youth and its consequences in later life.
Poet, journalist, and essayist Powell (Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, and the Ghost of Dr. King, 2012, etc.) grew up the son of a struggling single mother who dreamed he would become “somebody important.” Though loving and encouraging, his mother was also ferociously strict and often beat Powell to keep him on the straight and narrow. Between her brutality and the poverty and violence he faced in the New Jersey ghettos where he grew up, Powell felt as though he were living in a “concrete box” from which there was no escape. Despite the many obstacles he faced and his flirtation with a life of petty crime, he still excelled academically. Yet his suppressed rage and sadness often erupted at unexpected moments and led to arrests and his expulsion from high school. Powell still managed to gain tuition-free acceptance into Rutgers University, where he became involved with black student activists. After the university suspended him for pulling a knife on a fellow student in a fit of frustration, Powell left for New York determined to make a living as a writer. His experiments in poetry and journalism eventually led to a job writing about hip-hop music and culture for Vibe. But his anger at working for two white editors at a black magazine caused him to eventually be fired. Powell’s life spiraled into an abyss of alcoholism, depression, and dysfunctional relationships, one of which ended after he physically attacked his lover. After two unsuccessful runs for Congress, Powell went to Africa, where he finally began to experience personal healing. The author’s story is powerful and unsparing. By the end, his narrative bears witness not only to the life of one black man, but to an American society still bound to a tragic history of racism.
Raw-edged honesty at its most revealing and intense.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6368-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Heinrich's tedious personal account of 12 long months holed up in the wilderness of western Maine is so didactic and self-involved that it makes the reader want to hightail it to the nearest strip mall, where people are at least what they seem. Heinrich (Ravens in Winter, 1989, etc.), a zoologist tired of paper pushing at the University of Vermont, retreats to the New England woods to see the world up close. He chops down trees, assembles a log cabin, digs a latrine, and plants vegetables. But for all his posturing, this hideaway for do-it-yourselfers is not so solitary or so rustic. A newspaper arrives at his mailbox daily (he claims it's necessary so that he can start his morning fire); and he installs a telephone and answering machine in his neighbors' outhouse. Most of Heinrich's days are spent watching his pet raven, Jack, eat the roadkill he has lovingly collected for the bird while fondly recalling meals of run-over muskrat and raccoon he himself consumed in college; calculating the number of seeds a young birch has to shed (2,415,000); creating endless lists of the colors of fall leaves (``light lemon yellow,'' ``yellow with dot-sized red speckles,'' etc.); counting and counting the black cluster flies that invade his cabin (12,800, or ``nine and a half cups full, level''); explaining how to prepare braised mice (``pull the skins off and the guts out'' and throw them in a little olive oil); and making flatulent observations like ``Life is not a spectator sport.'' Heinrich should have learned a lesson from the mountain men he calls his heroes: ``tough men, who did not write books about their exploits, or even talk of them.'' Banality posing as self-knowledge. More boring than Walden.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-201-62252-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
Disarming tales from a frontier doctor, an appealing old coot who actually considers himself a mere mortal. The year is 1949. Young Dr. Ron Losee has piled his wife and child into an army-surplus jeep and pointed it at Ennis, Mont., a wee burg hard by the foot of the Tobacco Root Range. What follows are the trials and tribulations of a GP forced to handle all manner of catastrophes, large and small, with a wing and a prayer and a sharp knife. Losee has a smart take on his profession: ``Doctoring should not be a business, and I think that the surgeon who operates needlessly, as it were, possesses the morality of a rapist.'' He charges each incident with enough drama to draw the reader in like blood to a cotton swab. Fractures are set; hot appendixes snipped; laryngectomies, stitchings, lancings, and bilateral castrations performed; an arm removed with a hacksaw. His theater of operations is an army cot illuminated by an old car headlight. His mistakes and failures are confessed and serve to humanize him; so do his wrenching losses, as when a child dies, and her father, dazed and confused, begs the nurse not to throw the body out with the trash. For a break, Losee shuttles off to Montreal to attend a residency in orthopedic surgery. He returns to Ennis, now with a hospital of its own, and starts to specialize in knee work, gaining a modest reputation in the process. Most of the stories hereafter revolve around lateral, medial, and cruxial ligaments, but the humor shines right through all the bloody tissue. Get this guy to a biochemist and have him cloned. As a memoirist, he's just fine; as a physician, we could use a few more thousand just like him. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1994
ISBN: 1-55821-323-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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