A seaworthy effort. (b&w photos, illustrations)
Lively, encapsulated histories of a dozen or so adventurers, scientists, and eccentrics who experimented to discover ways to plumb the depths of the ocean, written by British scientist Trevor (Marine Biology/Univ. of Liverpool).
Nobody had ever gone skindiving before John Guy Gilpatric created the first diving mask out of an old pair of flying goggles. That was in the South of France late in the 1920s, but people had been upending bell jars to capture the air inside in order to dive—and breathe—since Aristotle. Later in the 20th century, the efforts to discover the secrets of the deep became more scientific. J.B.S. Haldane, who follows his distinguished father in Trevor's study, began as a demolitions expert, progressed to the serious study of blood chemistry in the water and in the sky, and finished by laying the foundations for human and population genetics. He probably deserves his own book. Each of these adventuresome, sometimes foolhardy men arrived at the bottom of the ocean by a different route—from a love of the sea, from a love of the air, from pure curiosity, or from the love of photography. Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was seminal for most of them. Many tended to hurl themselves into the center of their experiments, some squashing themselves into leaky diving bells, others percolating their own blood for scientific ends. But what all Norton's subjects have in common is a battle against the pressure of deep water as they fought against the dark and the huge weight of an undersea atmosphere that tended to make eardrums perforate, bleed, and worse: "If the air supply was cut off," says Norton of some early divers who were over 150 feet down in primitive "hard hat" diving suits, "his entire body could be rammed up into the helmet, except for the soft bits which would shoot up the air hose."
A seaworthy effort. (b&w photos, illustrations)Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7867-0750-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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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