An earnest and well-intended effort but an outline for an adventure story more than that story itself.
A brief debut book about a young, Peruvian-born geologist’s adventures in the Amazon.
Ruzo begins with an interesting premise: his grandfather had filled him with boyhood tales of an Amazonian river so hot that it boils. Now, decades and degrees later, he sets out to find it, mindful of his grandfather’s valediction: “But remember: the jungle keeps her secrets well, and she is not afraid to keep those who come after them.” Against the thought of a river with such turbulent properties, the author found numerous forces arrayed against him, not least establishment science, whose representatives scoff at the thought that the relatively stable geothermal region of the Amazon might conceal a boiling river. It did not help that grandpa was by then suffering from dementia and that the whole enterprise was seeming more and more legendary. Still, Ruzo pressed on, and he discovered that the story involved numerous players: anthropologists, shamans, bureaucrats, indigenous peoples who want more than anything to be left alone, oil explorers for whom a boiling river might be anathema, since it could well boil away any petroleum tucked away below the surface. The story is a promising one, but it has too many moving parts to be neatly contained in so short a space, particularly when it gets to the heart of the matter: how the jungle, once explored, is almost certainly doomed to development. No one after Redmond O’Hanlon has ever gone to the Amazon thinking it would be easy, but Ruzo too often slips into vague mysticism just at the moment his narrative should take on a hard edge: “his river challenges what we think we know”; “There is so much hidden in the world, occulted in the everyday—both in the unknown and in what we think we understand.”
An earnest and well-intended effort but an outline for an adventure story more than that story itself.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1947-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: TED/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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