A harrowing and somewhat surreal account of life on the distant fringes of civilization.
As might be expected, Ross’s memoirs are filled with adventures and close calls with wild animals in beautiful, natural settings—but what makes it memorable is his vivid account of surviving an attack by murderous Hutus armed with machetes.
A wildlife biologist who has been working full-time as a safari guide since 1986, Ross has had his clothes stolen by hyenas, been chased by lions and buffaloes, and once made a narrow escape from a herd of charging elephants. He specializes in leading small groups into the East African bush—armed with cameras, however, rather than guns. With the aid of his trusty Land Cruiser and a six-seater Cessna, he takes his clients to private wildlife reserves and mobile campgrounds in national parks, where he makes sure they get close to the wildlife they have come to see. They make their way to the banks of the Mara River, where they watch 1,500-pound crocodiles turn the annual migration of zebras and wildebeest into a horrific feeding frenzy; they hike into Uganda’s Impenetrable Forest for close-up views of rare mountain gorillas. It was there, in 1999, that he and members of his group were attacked by a rebel army of Rwandans who had crossed the Congo border. Caught by surprise in the pre-dawn attack, he was taken captive and beaten, two of his clients were hacked to death, and many others were either murdered or kidnapped—a tragedy that is unmatched by any of Ross’s life-and-death encounters with wild animals in the bush. The wildlife stories reveal a quiet humor, an observant eye, and a deep love of and respect for nature—but the massacre in the Impenetrable Forest and its aftermath change the tone of this account from an appealing selection aimed at natural history buffs and armchair adventurers to an appalling reminder to all that the most dangerous beasts out there are human.
A harrowing and somewhat surreal account of life on the distant fringes of civilization.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-6672-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
