by Peter Allison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2009
In some of the world’s most remote and fascinating locations, Allison sticks resolutely to the most conventional narrative...
Safari guide Allison (Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide, 2007) recalls his experiences with deadly animals.
In ragged chronological fashion, the author takes us on a ten-year journey, from his period of guide training, to his unsatisfying experiences as a trainer of other guides, to his four-year Australian hiatus and, finally, his happy return to Africa. The chapters—mainly stand-alone accounts of his experiences—follow a general pattern: I didn’t realize what I was doing; I got in trouble; I escaped with my life! Often the segments begin with a bit of dialogue and feature varying measures of self-deprecation (frequently about his feckless driving), wildlife lore, some exciting bit of danger—often, conveniently, beyond the view of any witnesses other than himself and the beast—and even the occasional insensitive analogy: He makes facetious allusions to both Helen Keller and the fire-bombing of Dresden. Along the way are obligatory I-could’ve-died moments—often late at night, his only weapon a flashlight with dying batteries—with lions, leopards and a particularly annoyed elephant that punished Allison for trying to snatch a souvenir hair or two from its tail. There are moments of regret, too, generally involving the death of an animal. On one occasion the author informed the local authorities about a buffalo threatening the camp; two shooters arrived to deal with it and enacted what the author calls “an incomprehensively brutal slaughter.”
In some of the world’s most remote and fascinating locations, Allison sticks resolutely to the most conventional narrative road.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59921-469-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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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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