An exciting, detailed account of man versus adversity.
Call him crazy but determined: the story of Australian adventurer Cope (Off the Rails: Moscow to Beijing on Recumbent Bikes, 2004), who jettisoned his bike for a horse to gallop across Mongolia.
The author’s 2004 horseback trip from Mongolia to Hungary, 6,000 miles, was supposed to take 18 months but dragged on for three years. Cope aimed to recapture some of the magical freedom he imagined still existed for the nomads of the Mongolian steppes, descendants of Genghis Khan and his marauding empire. The author was also determined to dispel the stereotypes prevalent among Russians and others that Mongolians were barbaric and uncivilized and their existence more backward than the peoples of the neighboring societies. In a sensitive account both personal and historical, Cope delineates the nuts and bolts of such a daunting equine adventure: procuring the necessary horses (several sets of them, as Mongolian horses could not be removed from the country), and learning to ride and care for them properly, along with a great deal of research about the Mongolian empire and the life of the herding nomads (e.g., the return of the Tatars to the Crimea since their removal during World War II). The author even learned some Mongolian and Russian. Cope invited his share of hardships, which came from camping out in the wilderness, at full mercy of the elements, horse thieves and wolves, among other daily perils. Though he (and for the first two months, his girlfriend) relied on the generosity of the nomads and their extraordinary sense of hospitality, navigating the borders set him back mightily. The author infuses his ambitious account with the stories of the people and tales of the animals who inspired the journey, rendering the book heartfelt and memorable.
An exciting, detailed account of man versus adversity.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-072-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2013
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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