by Roman Dial ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
A poignant, highly moving memoir of tragic circumstances and a lifelong love of exploring.
A brisk account of a father’s search for his 27-year-old son, who vanished on a solo trek through Costa Rica’s Corcovado jungle.
Alaskan adventurer and ecologist Dial (Mathematics and Biology/Alaska Pacific Univ.; Packrafting! An Introduction and How-To Guide, 2008) chronicles his quest to figure out what happened to his son, Cody. Fusing personal history with elegy and adventure, this arresting narrative of every parent's worst fear begins with the author’s background and then recounts the Dial family’s many exciting excursions. Meticulous memories of father and son exploring places like Alaska and Borneo establish Cody as a person who grew into a capable adventurer and biologist. In the second section, the author pieces together Cody’s volcano climbs and resourceful forays in Central America before contact with his parents ceased. His last email was written in Costa Rica in 2014, and its haunting last line—“…it should be difficult to get lost forever”—reverberates throughout the text. When he realized that his son may have disappeared, Dial left for Costa Rica to unearth the truth. With the assistance of his friends, wife, and an intriguing mixture of officials and locals (who weren’t always forthcoming with information), Dial confronted rumors of foul play and continued to sift through his own knowledge of his son’s character for clues. The author’s guilt at having sparked Cody’s interest in the wild mingles with the veteran adventurer’s tactical calm in the face of numerous obstacles. His descriptions of Costa Rica's jungles echo with mystery, and, despite his grief, Dial’s writing remains measured and cleareyed. When he recounts how a TV crew took a sensational angle for the sake of drama, the author’s dismay is palpable. Two years later, Cody’s remains were found, and it was determined that his death was an accident, which brought his family some sense of closure. In its emotional restraint and careful descriptions of the wild, this is a slow-burning tribute.
A poignant, highly moving memoir of tragic circumstances and a lifelong love of exploring.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-287660-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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