Forthright remembrances of a highly capable author’s gritty sojourns in some of the world’s most dangerous places.
The burly memoir of a diabetic Vietnam veteran recalling his later-in-life adventures as a Department of Defense contractor in the war-ravaged but, for contractors, lucrative Middle East.
The author, who uses the pen name Tenacity (T.W.S.C.: A Shrouded Autobiography, 2014), is nothing if not unusual. In 2003 and in his 50s, a time in life when many are contemplating retirement, he signed on with a defense contractor and headed off for Saddam Hussein’s former palace in Baghdad, his assigned digs while he worked setting up phone and computer systems. Nobody was there to meet him at the airport when he arrived. This was no great problem for the swashbuckling author, whose resourcefulness and fatalistic willingness to take risks—themes that recur throughout the book—got him not only to the palace gate, but through six years as a contractor in far-flung outposts where he was regularly three times the age of the soldiers around him. His sometimes-dicey travels to various Iraqi cities and also to Afghanistan, Qatar, Kuwait, and Oman are detailed along with his observant but often less-than-vivid impressions of each post and the people there. Readers learn that his pen name befits his indispensable-man doggedness in repairing and upgrading computers and devices. However, in this essentially ground-level chronicle, those looking for deep insights into Middle Eastern affairs will not find it among the author’s scattered, big-picture opinions. For instance, the author does not or will not satisfy our interest in knowing how much he and other contractors earned for working in these often hazardous places. Yet the book, which is enhanced by black-and-white photos, is brightened by an improbable love story in which the author, who has grown children but makes no mention of a wife, wooed and eventually wedded a Brazilian woman whom he met on eHarmony while in Oman during 2006 and 2007. Pictures of these two in exotic climes light up what are otherwise fairly pedestrian snapshots of places and people. Many include the author, who is less reluctant to show his face than he is to reveal his name.
Forthright remembrances of a highly capable author’s gritty sojourns in some of the world’s most dangerous places.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1491746820
Page Count: 224
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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