The record of a flight, in the summer of 1991, to each of the contiguous 48 states in a WW II-vintage biplane trainer, by bestselling novelist Coonts (Flight of the Intruder, etc.). Though the subtitle seems to beg the book's comparison with John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley or William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, Coonts's gee-whiz tone soon places his book into a kind of upbeat appreciation of America rather than into a dour, midlife odyssey. You'll recall that Steinbeck was at the end of a long, somewhat soured career, while Heat-Moon had lost in love and seemed to be at the end of his career. Coonts, however, is divorced but riding a crest of popularity, and to pursue his chief passion, old airplanes, with the book already bankrolled is a wonderful lark. Even to include his 14-year-old son, David, on part of the journey seems calculated, although the father-son takes are appealing, particularly when David, high above the earth, folds his arms and announces, ``I'm bored.'' Coonts makes pilgrimages to such shopworn shrines as Disneyland, Hannibal, and even Mt. Rushmore, but he hasn't here much fresh to say about them; he's just a tourist. On the other hand, the culture of the private plane comes delightfully to life as Coonts marvels at a country where every little town has its strip, its laconic air controller, its cheap, clean motel just down the road. His observations on world politics seem pedestrian, but his insight into general aviation is clear and noteworthy: ``The general aviation industry is dying. Federal regulation and the legal system have driven it to the lip of the grave where it is waiting to expire and fall in.'' Middle-class, upbeat to a fault, and unmeditative. Yet the descriptions of flight and the portrait of an America seemingly trapped in a time-warp are arresting. (Eight page photo-insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 8, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-74884-X
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
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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