Digging deep beneath the headlines, Sullivan unfolds a complicated, politically charged story that will engage any reader...
American Indians and whales collide in this resounding work of environmental and ethnographic reportage by the author of the quirky travel book Meadowlands (1998).
When Sullivan learned that Washington State’s Makah Indians planned to revive their long-dead tradition of whale hunting, this self-effacing “filer of facts for hire” figured he could churn out enough copy to pay for a trip and get in a little sightseeing. He did not reckon with the depth of this complex story, which occupied the next two years of his life and involved a vast dramatis personae including antiwhaling activists, Indian traditionalists, federal and state government officials, and a few assorted hippies. Prominent among all of these, too, is the ghost of Herman Melville; Sullivan constantly refers and alludes to Moby-Dick, even borrowing a chapter title or two, but insists that the Makah whale hunt was the opposite of Captain Ahab’s quest. “Moby-Dick is a book that builds to a symphonic climax of symbols after a long accumulation of steadily juiced-up details,” he writes. “The Makah had their symbols—the whale hunt and the whale—and they worked toward their earthly goal, the death of a whale, and an accompanying acceptance of death.” The impending demise of a gray whale, once endangered and now a talisman of the world conservation movement, looms over the narrative like a black shadow, and Sullivan's description of the hunt fairly sighs with tragic inevitability. But not with condemnation: he convincingly explains why the Makah people had come to view the restored whale hunt as a vehicle for asserting and maintaining their vanishing traditions. His book is filled with the voices of the Makah, allowed to speak for themselves against a chorus of disapproving outsiders who, the author admits, also have a point.
Digging deep beneath the headlines, Sullivan unfolds a complicated, politically charged story that will engage any reader concerned with the environment and indigenous peoples.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-86433-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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