It's heavy weather—both meteorologic and emotional—pretty much all the way for Bird on her trans-Atlantic, trans- Mediterranean sail, but the writing goes very smoothly. When Bird, who has written for Sail, Sailing, and other magazines, shoves off into the Chesapeake, it's hurricane season; before long the first squall, a terrifying wall of black, bats her around. But she knows from sailboats: Twice before, she had made solo long-distance hauls; seven times she had crossed the Atlantic. This was the singlehanded leg of her trip to Greece; just her and her 42-foot boat, Sonnet, and her self-steering wind vane (``like a cognizant creature, a second crew member'') until the Azores. Much of this book comes as a series of journal entries, jottings of anything that trundles through her mind, making for some odd juxtapositions: ``living in nothing but underwear'' mingles with ``fixed the leech cord on the jib.'' Bird plays the nautical lexicon as if it were a stringed instrument, merrily jibing and trimming and reefing her way east, at one point teetering herself to the bow as the boat zipped along in the company of dolphins, literally soaking herself in their world. In the Azores she must make the transition to sailing with a companion, but she's too judgmental, snippy, and moody for it to go well. Visiting with her expatriate folks in Spain is dreadful: Dad has the dwindles, Mom's killing herself with liquor. Anguish and anger bubble under Bird's surface, frequently erupting. More women crew for her in the Mediterranean, creating a guarded, fiercely female world with enough energy to generate its own tempestuous weather system. Except when Bird lapses into New Age bunkum—``My animal within is the contrary Antelope''—she writes of the journey with brio and dash. Five thousand stormy miles, and worth most every minute of it, for Bird and for her readers.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-86547-507-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1997
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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