Both heartfelt and conflicted, Young’s passion for cars is tempered by his environmental conviction, a prescient reminder...
Young (Waging Heavy Peace, 2012) returns to reflect on the two defining love affairs of his life: cars and dogs.
The author’s interest in cars dates back to when he was a young boy riding around in his family’s 1948 Monarch Business Coupe with his dog Skippy tucked away in the car’s trunk. Perhaps the reason cars made such an impression on him is that the family moved around so often, developing a sense of itinerancy that fostered a love of being on the road. Young’s many road trips, however, allow him to retroactively calculate the emissions pumped into the atmosphere. This recurring diversion awkwardly interrupts the narrative, but Young feels obliged to include it due to his eco-conscious beliefs. It’s an interesting juxtaposition: the author’s love of cars against his awareness of the ecological damage caused by fossil fuel consumption. Nevertheless, Young reveals that his interest in cars was always about their aesthetic appeal, and it was not merely limited to the newest and most streamlined vehicles. The author admits that what really caught his eye were cars with an indescribable uniqueness, which often attracted him to “clunkers.” These cars spoke to Young, holding a romantic sway over him. Among his favorites was the black hearse that functioned as the Squires’ unofficial tour bus, as well as a 1957 Corvette he purchased to reward himself after his first taste of success with Buffalo Springfield. The plaintive and straightforward approach to Young’s remembrances evokes a kindly paternalism as he candidly recounts details of his experiences forging his musical ambition in Canadian clubs, the hippie scene in Los Angeles, his later solo career and the innumerable rides that took him there. Ultimately, Young issues a warning about our dependence on fossil fuels and the resultant threat of climate change while showcasing new and efficient alternative fuel systems.
Both heartfelt and conflicted, Young’s passion for cars is tempered by his environmental conviction, a prescient reminder that the Earth is more important than a hobby.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-0399172083
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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