Some readers will admire Willis’s courage; others will lament his foolhardiness. All will be vastly entertained.
Was William Willis, who went rafting across the Pacific alone in 1954, the avatar of today’s extreme sports aficionados—or simply out of his mind?
Thor Heyerdahl’s 1947 Pacific crossing in a balsa raft, immortalized in his classic documentary Kon-Tiki, inspired numerous imitators. In his first nonfiction foray, novelist Pearson (Glad News of the Natural World, 2005, etc.) refers to Heyerdahl and such subsequent transoceanic rafters as Alain Bombard, Eric de Bisschop and DeVere Baker, but his narrative concentrates mainly on the life and adventures of William Willis, who died in 1968 attempting a solo crossing of the Atlantic at age 75. The wonder is that he lived so long. German-born Willis began his seagoing life as a 15-year-old deck boy. He jumped ship in Texas two years later and spent nearly two decades roaming across America, in 1926 winding up in Manhattan and educating himself at the New York Public Library. Through the years, Willis held more than 50 jobs and authored books and poems all of which were rejected by publishers. In 1938, he traveled to the notorious Devil’s Island and successfully freed a prisoner, the son of his Manhattan landlady. This incident offered a preview of the impulsiveness, bad planning and almost criminal negligence that characterized Willis’s decision at age 60 to cross the Pacific on a raft, simply to see if he could do it. Miraculously, he did it twice. These voyages, during which everything but the result went wrong, form the heart of Pearson’s look at a man whose odd dietary notions, novel fitness regimen, frugal lifestyle and almost mystical belief made him a crackpot by most 1950s estimates.
Some readers will admire Willis’s courage; others will lament his foolhardiness. All will be vastly entertained.Pub Date: June 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-33594-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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