A shrewd meditation on home, family, nature, and the author’s native South.
An ornithologist writes about himself as a member of a rare and perhaps endangered species: the African-American birder.
Lanham (Wildlife Ecology/Clemson Univ.) describes himself as “an unusually colored fish out of water,” as someone who doesn’t “fit the common calculus.” He describes his upbringing in the rural South in a rapturous way that shows how nature became his religion, but he also knows why many of his race associate the land with harsher memories, backbreaking labor, and being treated as less than equal or even human. As he traces his singular path from the family homestead through higher education—he switched majors from engineering to zoology and lost his scholarship—Lanham occasionally succumbs to an excess of literary flourish and a penchant for alliteration in particular. In the space of less than five pages, he writes of “the sylvan savior of southern soil,” “the priceless places where nature hangs by tooth, talon, and tendril,” and “something furred, feathered, finned, or scaled that scurried, swam, or flew.” Yet when the published poet gives way to the memoirist, his experiences require no flowery expression. Perhaps the most powerfully provocative chapter is “Birding While Black,” which begins, “it’s only 8:38 a.m. and I think I might get hanged today.” Apparently, a lone black man with binoculars arouses suspicion in neighborhoods where Confederate flags abound. The author is also illuminating on what some might see as the contradiction in values between his passions for birding and hunting, in what he calls “my transition from a wine-drinking, cheese-eating ecologist to a beer-swilling, venison-chewing wildlife biologist.” Ultimately, he brings the memoir full circle in a search for roots that expand his sense of identity, as the home he once knew is not what it was but remains forever in his memory and his heart.
A shrewd meditation on home, family, nature, and the author’s native South.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-57131-315-7
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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