With side trips to areas scarcely visited before, this is a fine guide to places with better views of the world.
A sagacious walker and writer guides us on a new journey of discovery, a different kind of road trip about roads themselves and what they mean.
A thru-hiker on the Appalachian Trail (one who traverses the entire trail), environmental journalist Moor considers how traces became footpaths, roads, and highways over countless millennia, from the tracks of Precambrian proto-animals to life today. He reports how ungulates, including deer, horses, and giraffes, know where they are going by using marked pathways. The author chronicles his visits with elephants and deer-hunting expeditions. A good place to eat, expectedly, is normally high on the list of reasons for vertebrate and insect travel. Moor also learned, by walking with them, how Native Americans navigated the land they once tended. His varied chronicle of the paths taken by those who went before us is consistently fascinating and entertaining as we learn how trails are made by roaches, bison, and trekkers on the AT. His wide-ranging report represents a nascent scientific discipline, drawing out the wisdom of the paths scouted by Darwin, Thoreau, and Camus. Moor celebrates the history and popularity of the rigors of the AT even when, after the introduction of a carriage path in the 1850s, it “became possible to travel from the back alleys of Boston to the top of Mount Washington without taking more than a few steps.” Now there is a movement to extend the AT through Canada. Walking with a fabled hiker called Nimblewill Nomad, Moor discovered that, “every morning, the hiker’s options are reduced to two: walk or quit. Once that decision is made, all the others (when to eat, where to sleep) begin to fall into place.” It’s a curious form of freedom from all the choices society requires.
With side trips to areas scarcely visited before, this is a fine guide to places with better views of the world.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-3921-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
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
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