by Laurie Gwen Shapiro ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2018
Thoroughly researched, but the narrative reads like a yarn from that era.
The story of an adventurous boy who captured America’s imagination in an age of significant exploration.
During the 1920s, when the spirit of adventure surged through the country, nobody felt it more strongly than Billy Gawronski, the first-generation son of Polish immigrants. Even in high school, he appeared fated for a life in his father’s business, but Billy not only had other plans, he had the determination to see them through. He idolized Cmdr. Richard Byrd and ached to join what was heralded as a historic voyage to Antarctica during a time when America’s appetite for such adventure had been whetted by the exploits of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. Billy collected news stories about Byrd’s expedition, of which there were many, for this was as much a public relations campaign as it was an exploring expedition, with the Byrd camp feeding reporters what their readers wanted. “Was anyone more determined than Billy to hitch a ride on the most famous rig in America?” asks journalist and documentary filmmaker Shapiro’s book debut. “It was the bold, he was certain, who won the right to adventure.” Billy was bold, but he was by no means alone, as he discovered on his first stowaway attempt that others had had the same idea. All of them were discovered, captured, and taken off the ship. But Billy persisted, following the ship from its New York launch down the coast to Virginia, far from his home, where he continued to try to join the expedition and continued to be rejected. He was remanded to police custody on his third attempt, but his persistence ultimately paid off, as Byrd and the newspapers caught wind of his story and decided to make it a highlight. So Billy joined the crew, and his determination changed the course of his life. This book isn’t so much a seafaring adventure as a getting-to-sea adventure, but it ultimately reveals as much about a country’s changing values as it does about one boy’s pluck.
Thoroughly researched, but the narrative reads like a yarn from that era.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5386-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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