A sweet, detailed recounting of a life well-lived in America’s wild places.
An avid outdoorswoman recalls her many adventures in this tender memoir.
Debut author Brown was born in California’s San Francisco Bay Area in 1943, and her recollections of the growth and change of the American West form the core of a family history that stretches from the mid-20th century to the present day. Brown grew up in an exciting time in California, and her teenage years coincided with the growth of folk music by the likes of Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, and Bob Dylan. Her parents instilled a love of the outdoors in her from a young age, and she spent many hours hiking under canopies of coastal redwoods and exploring California’s beaches. She was attending Marin Community College, studying art and photography, when the Cuban missile crisis and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy occurred. After getting married to her first husband on New Year’s Eve 1964, they began crisscrossing the country in a Volkswagen van, exploring America’s protected wilderness areas when the camping and hiking industries were just beginning to form—long before they became as successful as they are today. Her adventures would eventually span Europe and North America, and she crossed paths with theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking and rebellious author Edward Abbey, who wrote the 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. In its best moments, Brown’s memoir paints a loving portrait of a life spent exploring the American West, from joyous ordinary events, such as cooking simple meals in Death Valley, to adrenaline highs while rafting down the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. Along the way, Brown describes many remarkable experiences, including getting shot at in a California desert where members of the Manson family roamed and scaling some of the West’s grandest mountains. Toward the end of the memoir, Brown’s writing sometimes devolves into lists of events rather than telling the solid stories that make other sections shine. These latter parts sometimes seem more like a letter to a distant relative than a fully realized memoir, but they still clearly come from a place of deep love.
A sweet, detailed recounting of a life well-lived in America’s wild places.Pub Date: March 31, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5320-6874-4
Page Count: 186
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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