Pleasant outdoors stories that will appeal to nature lovers, avid canoeists, and armchair travelers.
A woman and her family canoe the waterways of America.
At the age of 10, Leaf (A Love Affair with Birds: The Life of Thomas Sadler Roberts, 2013, etc.) had her first view of a canoe as it skimmed across Lake Alexander in Minnesota. From those moments, a desire to own and paddle a canoe of her own grew; at 14, she defied her father and headed out in a neighbor’s boat. From that moment, she was hooked, eager to plunge into the waterways of Minnesota, where she could immerse herself in nature. As she grew older, the author sought a relationship with someone who shared her passion for canoeing. In these short essays, Leaf combines her joy of paddling and of being in the great outdoors with lyrical descriptions of the natural waterways she and her family have paddled over the course of 40 years. From the Boundary Waters region to the Mississippi River to the Little Missouri River, Leaf chronicles the ups and downs of life on the water: the thrill of seeing a new species of bird to add to her list; setting up camp on a historic site once used by Lewis and Clark; the peace and quiet found on remote waterways; the feeling of anxiety as a storm rages overhead; the fear of falling out of a canoe in the middle of rapids; and the mixed emotions of realizing that many others have discovered the joys of paddling, to the point that some sites are overrun with people. Leaf ably interlaces her personal narratives with historical facts and natural details of the more than 25 lakes and rivers she has paddled. However, a series of maps would have been a helpful addition.
Pleasant outdoors stories that will appeal to nature lovers, avid canoeists, and armchair travelers.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8166-9854-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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
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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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