Perkins, former CEO of Orvis, has never had a bad day fly fishing or bird hunting, nor many selling the sports and their accouterments to the public, as reported in this memoir written with sporting journalist and Forbes FYI contributor Norman. Perkins was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but his father encouraged him to go into business: “He knew only a few men who did not work and were happy and that they were inevitably men of very high intelligence—He added that he didn’t think I qualified.” Perkins keeps this self-effacing tone brewing throughout the book, giving credit to his co-workers and his customers and his own native wits to turn Orvis into the grand sporting emporium it became under his near 30-year stewardship. Equal emphasis is placed on Perkins’s business philosophy and his days afield. In a twangy voice, he’ll drop his nuggets of business wisdom, most of which possess a Dale Carnegie common sense: love your work, be serious, innovate and stay ahead of the curve, listen to the customer, don’t be governed by a cash push but rather by the pull of an idea. These points, and the various tactical moves he made situating Orvis to capitalize on the fly-fishing boom of the 1980s, are invariably nestled in well-paced stories of hunting red-legged partridge in Spain, rough shooting in northern Scotland, going after salmon in Norway’s Alma River, trout in the chalk streams of England, and tarpon off Belize. And always he’s out there putting the Orvis equipment through its paces: “I tested that rod on the Malleo River in Argentina in late March when the red stags were bugling in the hills and the geese were gathering to migrate.” Hunters and fishers will weep with envy at Perkins’s life, and those who don’t may well be tempted to try them as he writes of these pursuits with humility and genuine relish. (photos, not seen) (First printing of 75,000; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-87113-757-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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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