Unique stories of travels about the rural South, livestock trading, and persons famous and obscure. Ferris (Anthropology/Univ. of Mississippi; Blues From the Delta, 1977) was a child when he met Lum at the Vicksburg, Mississippi, livestock auctions where Lum, while trading mules, spun out his countless stories. In 1970, Ferris began recording Lum, then 79, and the text here is almost entirely in Lum's voice. Lum's childhood was full of animals, such as his family's razorback hogs that were left to forage among neighborhood trash cans. Dogs chased these fleet pigs in vain: ``When they get to running they go so fast they just float.'' Starting in 1922, Lum traded livestock throughout Texas and met many famous people of the day. Al Smith, running for President, was popular among Texans with his saying, ``I'm for more whiskey and bigger bottles.'' In Dallas, Lum met the outlaw Frank James, brother of the slain Jesse. Frank had been acquitted at trial and was now offering himself on exhibit in a shoe store. In Lum's travels, persons rarely seen in the American literary landscape emerge: stout German farmers in Texas with mules they kept ``fat as town dogs''; solitary and silent West Texas ranchers that Lum considered shrewd judges of character; Lum's own black traveling companion, Squire Harris—an expert rider who displayed Lum's stock, making rough horses ``turn on a dime and then have a nickel to spend.'' Lum reveals some of Harris's secrets: How do you tell if a horse is blind? ``Clap your hands and if he throws up one ear he's blind on that side. If he's blind in one eye, he'll try to see out of that ear.'' A singular voice, detailing rare and fascinating views of the early 20th-century South.
Pub Date: April 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-41926-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1992
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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