by Thom Hatch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
A middling biography that serves as a useful reminder of an exemplary champion for the Earth.
A celebration of a significant 19th-century environmental activist.
Hatch (The Last Days of George Armstrong Custer: The True Story of the Battle of Little Bighorn, 2015, etc.) offers a thorough, but undistinguished, biography of George Bird Grinnell (1849-1938), known by his contemporaries as “The Father of American Conservation.” The author asserts that Grinnell “has not enjoyed the acclaim of other early conservationists,” but he was the subject of a fine, recently published biography, John Taliaferro’s Grinnell: America’s Environmental Pioneer and His Drive To Save the West, (2019) which covers essentially the same ground as Hatch’s more concise book. Both authors chronicle Grinnell’s evolution from Wall Street financier to eminent naturalist, his advocacy for Native Americans, his friendship with Theodore Roosevelt and others concerned about the environment, his editorship of Field and Stream, his founding of the Audubon Society, his prolific publications, and his many expeditions into “the untamed wilderness.” Neither author is able to offer intimate details about Grinnell’s personal life: for example, his sudden decision, at the age of 53, to marry a “young Boston widow,” 24-year-old Elizabeth Curtis Williams. Hatch emphasizes Grinnell’s “continuing growth as an advocate” for Native Americans, whom he considered “downtrodden” victims of governmental fraud. In Grinnell, writes the author, Native Americans “encountered not merely a sympathetic ear but a man who truly desired to tell an accurate story and offer a vivid yet unembellished portrayal” of tribal culture. Hatch boasts that his biography is “not only timely but has a chance to make a substantial difference” by alerting readers that natural resources “are under siege.” In the final chapter, he exhorts readers to preserve Grinnell’s legacy, to trust in the “wonders of science to develop a solution to climate change,” and to ensure that “civilization, commercialization, and conservation” can flourish together. The concerned public may “have more influence than we may think,” Hatch writes, “but it must be used wisely and properly.”
A middling biography that serves as a useful reminder of an exemplary champion for the Earth.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68442-333-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Turner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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