Following in the footsteps of Alfred Wallace, the 19th-century naturalist who perhaps beat Darwin in formulating a theory of evolution, author/explorer Severin (The China Voyage, 1995, etc.) sails among the island groups of eastern Indonesia, assessing the differences a century and a half has made on the region’s flora and fauna. The situation is decidedly mixed, although the narrative is consistently absorbing and quite exciting. Severin commissions the building of a prahu, the same craft Wallace sailed. The crew of the appropriately named Alfred Wallace, a motley yet efficient group, jam onto the cramped, fast, and sometimes unwieldy native boat for destinations described in Wallace’s account, The Malay Archipelago. What they find is both encouraging and depressing. On several of the less developed islands, the forests and their exotic bird populations seem intact, and the islanders themselves live much the same way Wallace described, by fishing and tilling cassava fields. A few nature preserves set up by the Indonesian government are functioning well. However, these islands, once the richest on earth due to their treasure of cloves, nutmeg, and mace, now export their unreplenishable wealth of rare and exotic birds, especially the Bird of Paradise, one of the most interesting and colorful of all birds. The waters surrounding the trading ports are polluted, the coral gardens long destroyed. While this adds some gloom, most of the narrative is sprightly. Severin and crew battle squalls, pick their way through lethal coral reefs, visit vibrant marketplaces, and endure various ailments with unflagging bonhomie. Paralleling Severin’s narrative is the tale of Wallace’s sojourn among the islands; Wallace endured every conceivable ill which nature could dish out—and his notes, sent back to England, arrived suspiciously close to the time Darwin made public his treatise on evolution. As an expertly illustrated travelogue, nature book, sea tale, and biography, Severin’s work qualifies as great entertainment. (b&w and color illustrations) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7867-0518-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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