Lonely Planet for the realm beyond the “No Trespassing” signs.
A handbook of spelunking's edgier, smellier cousin—navigating the secret passageways of urban areas, particularly sewers and subway tunnels—with a liberal dose of ego and occasional misogyny.
Gates, a tour guide and urban archaeologist, began venturing into the vast substratum below Manhattan ostensibly since he "wanted to see everything in New York City," but it quickly becomes clear that the places that catch his interest are only those where the normal life of the city is absent—the drains and shafts and catwalks that form the hidden infrastructure of the metropolis but that, to the untrained eye, seem primarily distinguished by their rivers of raw sewage and colonies of rats. Occasionally interesting and often befuddling, the narrative chronicles the author’s travels on five continents, hosted by an itinerant but close-knit community of urban explorers who break into cathedrals in the dead of night, climb suspension bridges while intoxicated and practice seduction techniques gleaned from pickup artists. The historical interludes, minilectures on the catacombs of Paris, the aqueducts of Naples, or the Nazi-era bunkers of Odessa, are the book's redeeming feature, but the occasional lazy sociocultural commentary—e.g., a bizarre paragraph explaining Italy's "lack of macho territorial energy that is so prevalent in countries with a more Anglo-Saxon heritage"—will make readers question the author's judgment. Neither living human society nor the natural world elicit much more than a passing glance here. An epic road trip from Brazil through Bolivia to Peru merits barely three pages, much of which is devoted to a qualitative analysis of the smell of the polluted Choqueyapu River.
Lonely Planet for the realm beyond the “No Trespassing” signs.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1585429349
Page Count: 352
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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