A brief but impressive debut collection.
A series of essays delicately evoking nature’s power and mystery.
Poet Mary Oliver provides the epigraph for essayist Rozema’s lyrical debut collection: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Like Oliver—and reminiscent also of Annie Dillard and Gretel Ehrlich—Rozema meditates on wildness, living, and dying; on spirituality, transcendence, and epiphany; and on music, friendship, and longing. The roads he followed traverse the Arizona canyons where he grew up; Seattle, where he landed in 1994, “somewhat lost, or somewhat free,” after his marriage ended; the Cascades in Washington; and the rugged terrain of Alaska, where he lived in his mid-20s. A self-proclaimed “agnostic to the core,” the author recalls that in high school, as a born-again Christian, he feared missing the rapture, “the name believers give to the extraordinary moment in which Christ would sweep his righteous followers up in the twinkling of an eye.” Searching for God, he was “driven to seminary by a kind of thirst,” but he lasted only a year. Disillusioned by the church, Rozema found sacred spaces in nature: on jagged mountain peaks, in the “redemptive wilderness,” on the open road. In a sacred place, the author writes, “I feel—simultaneously—my insignificance in the universe, and my centrality in it.” Spiritual sustenance, peace, and connection often seem elusive. “I would like to enter into the freedom that comes from losing the self,” writes the author. “I would like to be fully present in each moment…freed of regrets about the past and worries about the future.” Besides exploring the geology of land and archaeology of self, Rozema chronicles his father’s loss of memory from Alzheimer’s, which left the former math professor and choirmaster disoriented and bewildered. As he lay dying, the author sat by his bedside singing hymns and recounting family stories, witnessing the mysterious moment of death, when “time and space vanish.”
A brief but impressive debut collection.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59709-994-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Boreal/Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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