An engrossing, delightful descent into a life of books.
Colt (Defend The Valley, 1994) tells the story of a Manhattan-based mom-and-pop military bookstore in this memoir.
In September 1975, after Harris Colt learned that his small brokerage firm was shuttering, he said to his wife, Margaretta, “It’s time for the bookstore.” Although she had no idea what he was talking about, she was soon helping her husband realize his lifelong dream: to open a rare and out-of-print bookshop specializing in military history. Despite the risks of renting a storefront in Manhattan, including its proximity to dangerous neighborhoods and the fact that American interest in anything military was at a low ebb, the Military Bookman opened shop at 170 E. 92nd St. the next summer. This is Margaretta’s account of a quarter-century of selling books; of becoming an expert in the many histories, accounts, manuals, memoirs, and ephemera that make up the military market; and of learning to wrangle the obsessive collectors who seek them out. It chronicles the shifting landscape of Manhattan in the last decades of the 20th century and the changing tastes of the American public regarding warfare (always reflective of the politics of the time). Most of all, it’s the story of a couple who dedicated their lives and livelihoods to a small, peculiar field and the community that arose to embrace them. Colt is a surprisingly urgent and elegant writer, particularly when she gets into the minutiae of her merchandise: “One of my favorites was an anomaly, the rare depiction of Napoleonic battles by a Chinese artist, with a godlike view above the fray, almost aerial perspectives of tiny, ignorant armies on a not-too-darkling plain.” Expect no high human drama, though: although the characters are colorful, the books themselves are the focus of this memoir. For some, that may prove uninteresting after 50 pages, but never mind those people: this is a read for the reading-obsessed, for those who truly love the physicality, variety, and dynamism of the printed medium and for whom a day in the musty stacks of a darkened shop sounds like something close to paradise.
An engrossing, delightful descent into a life of books.Pub Date: June 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5088-4944-5
Page Count: 346
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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
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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