Alaska: where the whites live out their dreams or go bonkers, and the Natives sport attachÉ cases or swig straight from the bottle. McGinniss (The Selling of the President, Heroes) set out in late November, when the people who rode the ferry from Seattle "were going to Alaska for a reason." Starting with his cabin-mate, he learns their reasons. "The high state official" found himself in Fairbanks in 1949, after a tearing drunk, with only $1.70 in his pocket: "There still was an American frontier, and he had happened to stumble across it." To him, the frontier vanished with the pipeline. And McGinniss' old friend, who left a Massachusetts newspaper job in 1967 "in search of freedom and adventure," is now Atlantic Richfield's resident director of public relations. But the passing of the "real Alaska" hasn't yet closed the door to freedom or opportunity: in shabby, dreary Bethel, a young Eskimo woman and her three San Francisco hippie friends quickly became the town's librarian, museum curator, disk jockey, press photographer: the cultural powers-that-be. "If you've got any talent at all," says one, "you can use it to an unlimited extent." Still, they too are worried, McGinniss finds, by the pace of development. He makes other sorties: to Barrow, where the Eskimos, newly enriched by the Native Claims Act, send their basketball team to Hawaii to compete (along with "a dozen cheerleaders and thirty or forty students to do the cheering") and the white superintendent of schools doesn't dare rebuke them; to a Russian Orthodox Christmas festival—a week-long orgy of candy-eating—in a squalid Eskimo village; and to more conventional Alaska sites—the oilfields, a cabin back of beyond, a Senate hearing on preservation of the wilderness. In a sense his unstructured, non-sequential narrative is like a quick-cut trailer for a film that never gets underway; but if we're denied commanding thoughts, we're also spared pat generalizations. Instead: "The way you could tell a real Alaskan," one of his contacts comments, "was by how many marriages he had survived." And at the close, when McGinniss has a double-barreled "wilderness adventure"—he's threatened by grizzlies and comes upon a hidden, Shangri-La valley—there's reason to be grateful for the looseness, the come-what-mayness of the rest of the book. The raw, tacky, raucous human scene, and the isolation and cold, are subject enough. Engrossing reading and an addition to the basic Alaska shelf.
Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1980
ISBN: 1935347039
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1980
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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