A fine travelogue worthy of shelving next to Jonathan Raban and William Least Heat-Moon.
A well-recounted father-and-son journey in the Missouri River country.
That land is definitively Lewis and Clark territory, and that duo figures prominently, though mostly in the mountainous region of the title, a place that Faulkner (Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts, 2007)—a Kansas flatlander by way of Virginia—knows well. More, it was the haunt of Pierre Jean De Smet, a Jesuit priest who in 1840 and 1841 traveled the Oregon Trail and in the bargain helped “popularize that arduous journey west.” De Smet makes a good tutelary spirit for the journey, a wise intermediary among the worlds of Europe and Native America, a binary that still exists out on the land. Mixing in accounts by a Nez Perce warrior named White Thunder, Faulkner ventures a “three-legged understanding of the northern half of what was then called the Far West.” To make life interesting, he and his 18-year-old son Alex traveled by a variety of conveyances, including canoes, bicycles, and their own two feet, meeting all sorts of people, from wary sheriffs to itinerant Indians to truckers and scholars. Alex’s presence complicates the narrative, but in good ways, for the father-son business between them is emphatically less fraught than what readers encounter in the kindred spirit of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s a pleasure to find the drama in hailstorms and the bawls of grizzly bears instead. Faulkner tells an unadorned, unaffected story, with an occasional tendency to overquote from historical sources more than balanced by his strong descriptions of people and places—e.g., “We are on a high bluff of whitish-grey, speckled limestone, much of it silted over with a thin soil and fringed in blowing prairie grasses.” Among the many high points are a sympathetic reimagining of Little Big Horn and a hell-for-leather bicycle ride down an impossibly steep mountain, “down and down, swerving, leaning, braking, vast treescapes of fir and spruce greeting us at every turn.”
A fine travelogue worthy of shelving next to Jonathan Raban and William Least Heat-Moon.Pub Date: July 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8253-0792-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Beaufort
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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