This recounting of a Pacific run aboard a merchant marine ship from boating journalist Allen may be prosaic, but it is also lulling, as if it had caught the rhythm of wide ocean swells. Recently married to the first mate of the Endurance, a Titanic-size containership, Allen elects to go along with him on his next assignment. They would ship out of Oakland, Calif., en route to the Far East, with stops in the Aleutians, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Okinawa, and other ports of call, then make a long pull back to Long Beach, Calif. Allen's log of the trip is interspersed with annotations, histories (both personal and maritime), port tours, details of the ship's Brobdingnagian architecture, and a taste of what it is like to work for the merchant marine. She recounts the brutal hours, the quarrels and differences between crew members, the travails of women mariners. Allen depicts a world in flux (though often ruled by protocols dating back to the Hanseatic League): The arts of celestial navigation and sea savviness—skills that tempted the officers to the sea in the first place—have been replaced by global positioning systems and computer printouts. Dismayingly, too, she makes clear that the US shipping industry is taking its last bows; now down to 298 ocean vessels, it's a victim (as Allen would have it) of union bloat and flags of convenience. The book is prey to the doldrums of shipboard life, but when Allen gets a chance- -recalling a brush with mean weather or the abuse a female engineer endured—she can write with powerful immediacy. Allen's voyage may not have been ``two years before the mast'' (seafarer Richard Henry Dana is a great hero of hers)—it was actually two months aft of the mast in a sixth-floor stateroom—but one leaves her book sensing she paints a genuine portrait. (20 b&w photos, map, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-882593-20-0
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Bridge Works
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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