by Rory Nugent ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 2009
An incisive portrait that takes both place and people seriously, and that does them honor.
An elegiac portrait of an iconic place fallen on hard times and unlikely to rise again.
Travel writer Nugent (The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck, 1999, etc.) lived near the weather-beaten docks of New Bedford, Mass., for a couple of decades. Here, in the town famed for its role in the 19th-century whaling trade, the author chronicles his time among crusty old salts of today and the old landlubbers who love them. His dramatis personae make the sailors of Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm look like Girl Scouts—including one often-soused fellow who spoils for a fight with the newcomer, “his breath a noxious mix of Marlboros, house rye, beer, and Slim Jims,” but who then becomes a valuable source of information about what goes on out there on the shoals and banks. Nearly everyone who figures in Nugent’s tale works hard for little pay, and their lot gets ever tougher as bits and pieces of the New England economy decline and fall. Nugent’s interlocutor attests, on top of all that, that the IRS is out to get him: “To date, he swears to Almighty God, he has been audited a million freakin’ times.” Higher up the chum chain, a New Bedford captain has to put all his earnings into equipment, legal fees, fuel and food for the crew. Yet, “urged on by a combination of greed and daring,” he keeps at it—and good thing, too, for anyone who enjoys scallops. Nugent looks deep into the past at the New Bedford men, and sometimes women, who have taken to the waves—some the legal way, some not—from the privateers of the Revolutionary War era to the cocaine and heroin smugglers of more recent times. Unfortunately, Nugent’s account makes clear that New Bedford, with its “PCB-laced muck” and tough customers, isn’t much of a place to live or make a living.
An incisive portrait that takes both place and people seriously, and that does them honor.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-42064-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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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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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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