A thoroughly engaging account of a modern-day adventurer in the Alaskan backcountry—with spiritual elements mixed in.
A bush pilot relates his many encounters with his guardian angel in Alaska.
Bingman’s debut book is a fast-paced and ultimately winning combination of backwoods adventure yarns and personal faith journey centering on his audacious life as a bush pilot, fisherman, and jack-of-all-trades in the Alaskan wilderness. But the heart of the work is his accounts of his relationship with an angel simply named Joe. The escapades are told with smooth storytelling confidence that should appeal to armchair sports enthusiasts. The author comes from a family of pilots and risk-takers and he gives the impression of having found his real spiritual home in the Alaskan woods, where so many aviators have lived before him. “The back country of Alaska,” he tells his readers, “is riddled with twisted metal that once flew to that very spot and is now just someone’s story, slowly fading away.” But Bingman’s own tales are set apart by the presence of Joe, who turns up for conversations and moments of insight and almost always gives the author a feeling of companionship he wants to share with his readers. He hopes readers will “reflect on subtle miracles that have happened in your life and, with God’s help, start to realize that you are never truly alone.” Christian audiences will no doubt find some of Bingman’s Joe stories familiar to their own experiences, although more skeptical readers will likely wonder about some of the details. For instance, when a charging bear changes course at the last minute in the Ugashik district, the author thanks Joe “for being there for me when I needed him most.” But the angel makes no appearance in the tale—he just gets the credit. Such conveniences are common in this kind of faith recounting, and Bingman folds them so seamlessly into his personal reflections that even the most secular readers should find them easy reading.
A thoroughly engaging account of a modern-day adventurer in the Alaskan backcountry—with spiritual elements mixed in.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973610-39-7
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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