Well-paced, informative and seldom repetitive, Ryan’s story nearly ignites.
In his thrilling debut memoir, Ryan remembers his time spent serving as a California smokejumper.
Smokejumpers have earned a reputation for being more than a little crazy. Jumping out of a plane and parachuting toward an unpredictable, potentially lethal forest fire with the objective of extinguishing the blaze—that might deter most rational men and women. Ryan was a member of the courageous minority who willingly accepted this terrifying task. A gripping scene opens the memoir: With the inferno surrounding them, the firefighters are ordered to deploy their “shake and bake” shelters, aluminum survival tents intended for extreme situations. The ambient heat is palpable as the tent is showered by firebrands, and the author, sensing his own death, begins to pray. This high level of intensity sets the tone for the entire memoir. Smokejumpers are a close-knit band, united as brothers and sisters in their perilous endeavor. The author describes the difficulties of entering this profession, the rigors of training and his acceptance into this elite brotherhood. Learning his skills in California, he goes on to parachute into wildfires all over the United States, including Alaska. The presence of mortal danger is always close: planes crash, parachutes fail, wildfires turn. The author vividly describes colliding in midair with another jumper, an incident that resulted in his falling 60 feet and fracturing his spine. Capturing the “can do” persistence of America’s heroes, the author’s recovery and return to work are inspirational, spurred on by his philosophical and spiritual perspective. The memoir is also a brutally honest account of failed relationships that break down, in part, due to the author’s dedication to an unpredictable, dangerous profession. Further detail regarding the strategy of wildfire fighting would make for a more well-rounded study. Nonetheless, with an appropriate no-nonsense laconicism, there are true moments of laughter and heartache among the remarkable everyday lives of America’s lesser-known heroes.
Well-paced, informative and seldom repetitive, Ryan’s story nearly ignites.Pub Date: July 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1484024430
Page Count: 284
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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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