Not every piece is a winner, but this anthology of grief, anger, and even hope capably reflects Williams’ wise voice.
New and previously published essays from the well-known conservationist alternately rage and despair over national policies of land and wildlife conservation.
The election of Donald Trump spelled a dark moment for environmentalists like Williams (Writer-in-Residence/Harvard Divinity School; The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks, 2015, etc.), who increasingly sees a “world torn to pieces.” The erosion of the protection of public lands, most recently that of Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument, has compelled the author to become increasingly political, sometimes to the detriment of her personal life. When her longtime husband, Brooke, said that she “was too immersed in politics—‘obsessed’ was the word he used—and that it wasn’t healthy,” her response was telling: “We have to keep fighting….It’s not just about our species.” Owls, for which Williams has a particular affinity, would agree, as would countless other species, such as prairie dogs, wolves, and sage grouse, all of which suffer from the erosion of the Endangered Species Act (1973). A “totemic act,” it has “never been more relevant and never more at risk.” These essays—written between 2016 and 2018 and mostly high quality—take readers to extraordinary places, including the Great Salt Lake and surrounding areas; Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where she saw “one constant: pronghorns”; the Alaskan Brooks Range (“in the Arctic, global warming is not an abstraction”); the Galápagos Islands, where the author discovered countless wonders on land and at sea; the Virunga Mountains of Rwanda, where she observed gorillas amid a war-torn country bleeding itself for charcoal production. Elsewhere, she writes about how she confronted the religious politics of the Latter-day Saint patriarchy in Utah, where she lived, forcing her to leave her professorship for the unknown. She also confronts the traumatic, untimely death of her brother by suicide in 2018. Though the book contains mostly prose, there is also poetry and a long Q-and-A with fellow environmentalist Tim DeChristopher.
Not every piece is a winner, but this anthology of grief, anger, and even hope capably reflects Williams’ wise voice.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-28006-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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