A lighthearted, entertaining trip down Memory Lane.
A historical and nostalgic look at the family road trip.
In his first book, a mix of memoir, history lesson, and travelogue, advertising copywriter Ratay waxes wistfully over the rise and fall of the tradition of traversing the United States via the nation’s superhighways. Using as a jumping-off point his personal experiences in the 1970s as a child stuffed into the back of a station wagon with his siblings (“although ordinary Joes couldn’t afford a plane ticket, nearly every family could afford a car, often two”), the author covers a wide variety of topics related to family road trips. He discusses the construction of U.S. interstates, the need for dining establishments, gas stations, and motels for the families on the road, and the sights a child might have longed to see, including a whole slew of “World’s Largest” objects or animals. Ratay includes details about the rise of theme parks, including Disneyland and Disneyworld, Knott’s Berry Farm, and others, when more safety features, including seat belts, were introduced, and how the use of CB radios kept people in touch with one another on the road. He also shares his thoughts on how cheaper air fare and the need for faster travel have helped make the long road trip somewhat of a relic. Some of the more minute details—e.g., about the roof design on Stuckey’s restaurants and their distinctive yellow-and-red billboards—may not appeal to a wide audience, but much of the narrative will find favor with older readers who can readily recall their own experiences riding in the car while Dad drove and Mom navigated. By sharing this history, Ratay also provides a useful juxtaposition against the modern vacation, with each person engaged with an electronic device rather than each other and the surroundings outside the windows.
A lighthearted, entertaining trip down Memory Lane.Pub Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8874-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
