A companion to Waterlog, this will hopefully bring Deakin to the attention of American readers, who will find him a kindred...
Part Walden, part Road to Oxiana: The late British natural-history writer Deakin (Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, 1999) serves up an elegant meditation on trees and why they matter.
Put it down to the Druids and the Green Man, but folks back in the mother country love all things tree-related. They like toads, moles, sheep and suchlike critters, too, whence the deserved centrality of The Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit and the Pooh quartet, among other celebrations of country living. As Deakin puts it, they like these things perhaps precisely because they have lost so much of their rural heritage in recent decades, so that “the British generally take a correspondingly greater interest in what trees and woods they still have left.” Deakin, a literate chap, adds Gerald Manley Hopkins, Henry David Thoreau and Patrick Leigh Fermor to the mix, plus the Whole Earth Catalog, under whose influence he set about on an exercise in hippie communard living back in the day. But he was no latecomer. As he writes, he comes from a long, proud tradition of forest people, with fitting names in the family tree such as Wood and Greenwood, and forebears who belonged to the woodland-anarchist tradition of Robin Hood. To trust these pages, Deakin knows how to coppice and pollard; he writes lovingly of coops and sheds, moths and cornfields, oaks and apples. Not content to remain imprisoned in his lime-tree bower, Deakin departs midway through for a tour of other lands and other trees, venturing to East Anglia, France, Australia and Central Asia. Once the game is afoot, he writes with the studied breathlessness of David Attenborough (“We threaded our way off piste through more of the termite stalactites towards the ten-foot bushes, which, sure enough, were covered in ripe black fruit the size of small olives”) and communicates that he’s having the time of his life.
A companion to Waterlog, this will hopefully bring Deakin to the attention of American readers, who will find him a kindred spirit to Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry and other celebrants of the land.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9362-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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
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