A recounting of the turn-of-the-century exploits of Bill Miner, ``one of the most wanted outlaws in North America.'' He also turns out to have been one of the least colorful. Dugan (Interdisciplinary Studies/Appalachian State Univ.) and Boessenecker (Badge and Buckshot, 1988) attempt to breathe dramatic life into their protagonist with frequent references to Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, et al., but Miner, it seems, was about as exciting as oatmeal. Born in 1846 in Michigan, he moved in 1860 with his family to the California gold-rush town of Yankee Jims. Soon, the teenager began his criminal career, starting out by stealing horses, then moving up to robbing stagecoaches. When trains replaced coaches, Miner made the switch with aplomb, though his success was spotty: During his career, he spent more than 30 years at San Quentin and other jails. Many of his escapades were almost comic, complete with slipping masks, uncooperative sticks of dynamite, and hoboes wandering unwittingly onto the scene. Meanwhile, the authors contend that Miner was the first gay outlaw in the Old West—but their evidence for this claim is nebulous. That the bandit engaged in homosexual activities while behind bars is unsurprising, and that he frequently traveled with young men is hardly irrefutable proof that he was gay. Because, in his later years, ``Old Bill'' invariably targeted the widely hated railroads, he acquired a reputation for stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. From the evidence here, though, his generosity was largely imaginary. The authors are at their best, however, when discussing the folkloric elements in Miner's ``Robin Hood'' reputation. Occasionally diverting but mostly as grim as a sheriff's posse. (Seventy-three photos.)
Pub Date: June 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8061-2435-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1992
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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