by Patrick Beach ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 6, 2004
The straight stuff: sobering, eye-opening, and not all that sanguine.
A Texas journalist assembles and dissects the facts surrounding the 1998 death of David “Gypsy” Chain, an activist killed in California’s Humboldt County Redwood forest when a logger felled a tree nearby.
Was it murder? Negligence? Suicide? Simple trespass? Such are the complicated possibilities in this allegory for environmental confrontations the world over that some key questions never get definitive answers. Beach, a feature writer for the Austin American-Statesman, however, initially following the exploits of Houston corporate raider Charles Hurwitz’s efforts to jumpstart the old-line Pacific Lumber Co. in Scotia, California, provides the deep and balanced view one needs to assess the culpabilities and portents. The relatively sleepy company maintains an uneasy truce with eco-warriors (like famous “tree sitter” Julia Butterfly Hill) until Hurwitz acquires it and plans to double its cut rate. Anti-logging activist group Earth First! predicts the company will rapidly clear-cut its acres of Redwoods (including the oldest, most spectacular “first-growth” trees) until regulators get around to curtailing it and then Hurwitz will let the company bleed dry; some locals and PL employees agree. Lawsuits and pleas to regulators ensue; but Earth First!, along with new recruit Gypsy (his “forest name”), a 24-year-old Texan looking for some meaning in life, takes to the woods to harass working PL loggers. One of them, an incensed A.E. Ammons, says that if they don’t leave, “I'll make sure I got a tree coming this way!” And it happens. The author then deftly weaves portrayals of Chain’s deeply aggrieved but defiant mother, his girlfriends, fellow activists, the inevitable lawyers who get on board, etc., into an account that effectively rips into the half-truths, assumptions, and pernicious mythologies that degenerate so many environmental conflicts into the hopelessly unproductive, emotionally draining dilemma of Your Livelihood vs. My Future.
The straight stuff: sobering, eye-opening, and not all that sanguine.Pub Date: April 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-50617-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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