Dry, intelligent recollections of a fly-fishing life, from Raymond (Steelhead Country, not reviewed, etc.). Raymond has cobbled together 16 essays, grouped under four categories: fishing acquaintances, venues (the Miramichi, Christmas Island, the River Dee, and others), items (flies, cane rods, and an odd-man-out piece on reviewing fishing books), and a mostly humorous miscellany. For Raymond, who has been editing and writing fishing material almost as long as he has been fishing (though he makes his living as a newspaperman), this is not a greatest hits collection—there are winners and losers in each section. Rather, the essays are bound together by their honesty and practicality and in their desire to convey the boundless, multihued fascinations of a day astream, even when it features kidney stone torment, rattlesnakes, poison ivy, and dog feces all in an afternoon. As with any fishing book that isn’t afraid to float a position, readers will find much to quibble with: which writers on fly fishing are worth reading (he suspiciously neglects Thomas McGuane, Jim Harrison, Bill Barich, and Datus Proper, perhaps because Raymond is a bit prim), the claim that class status isn’t a consideration when choosing a fishing buddy, or the inconceivable statement that he liked the movie A River Runs Through It better than Norman Maclean’s book. There are times when his prose comes empurpled——each wave driven by the pulsing energy of the world’s great hidden heart——but not enough to be mortifying. There are other times when the writing feels like a plug for a lodge: “The 12 guest rooms had been outfitted with air-conditioning units and new queen-sized beds.” But for the most part, these are good fishing stories: glorious locales, smartly observed; a wealth of arcana and history and self-deprecating humor. And it doesn’t hurt that he can turn a decent phrase.
Pub Date: July 17, 1998
ISBN: 1-55821-700-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998
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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