Both an intensely lyrical and intimate scrapbook of familial history and a uniquely sublime travelogue of the American...
A debut memoir delivers a meditation on a writer’s Texas Panhandle homeland.
Armitage (The Post-2000 Film Western, 2016, etc.), a professor emerita of English and American Studies at the University of Texas at El Paso, begins her book with a return to her family home in Vega. Located in the middle of a sprawling prairie surrounded by acres of grassland, the area was settled by folks like her father, who arrived there at age 16 in 1926 with his family after being flooded out from their Arkansas delta farm. The author fondly describes the 32,000-square-mile Llano Estacado of her homeland as one of the largest North American plateaus and a place historically cultivated primarily by private ranches. Only briefly does the writer dip into her more recent ecological efforts, using government-funded conservation resources, to restore the native grasses and the natural wildlife habitats decimated from decades of farming. She questions what the land has to say and intends on discovering just that in an expansive series of hikes, beginning at her father’s Armitage Farms ranch and spanning miles to reach the cow camp of original cowboy and area settler Ysabel to “track the arc of their stories.” In a meandering, somewhat repetitive, but no less resonant fashion, Armitage unfurls the bucolic history of her family and the land through a rather haphazardly assembled procession of convivial anecdotes from her youth. In a series of spontaneously navigated summer treks, she tracks alongside the long-dried-up Middle Alamosa creek bed to behold dramatic canyons, Native American petroglyphs, and majestic mesas, all interwoven with the often bittersweet snippets of her life growing up. Beholden to the dusty plateaus of her past and the sweeping natural beauty that remains, the author’s intent was to revisit and rediscover the bounty of the area and to share its nostalgic and environmental potential. Armitage’s language and her memories are poetically written, even when describing the prairies that have become tainted by human occupation and depleted and disfigured by “sheep, cattle, farming, strip mining, oil, gas exploration, feed lots, dairies, microwave and cell phone towers.” An engaging geographer and historian, Armitage takes the pulse of the sacred land spread out before her through luminous memories and photographs, all with an appreciative eye and a nod toward its untapped ecological splendor.
Both an intensely lyrical and intimate scrapbook of familial history and a uniquely sublime travelogue of the American Southwestern landscape.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8061-5162-5
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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