Well short of definitive, but an entertaining summary of Cousteau’s life and career.
A warm biography of one of the icons of the environmental movement.
Matsen (Titanic’s Last Secrets, 2008, etc.) begins with the party where, as a young naval officer in 1936, Jacques-Yves Cousteau (1910–1997) met Simone Melchior, the admiral’s daughter who became the mother figure for the crew of Cousteau’s famed vessel, the Calypso. Cousteau arrived at the party with a movie camera, filming everything and instantly bewitching Simone. Matsen then shifts to Cousteau’s rather odd childhood. Raised partly in France, partly in America, he was the second son of a man who worked as factotum for a millionaire American playboy. Lonely and rebellious as a child, Cousteau discovered a passion for film at a time when the medium was in its infancy. Barred by injuries from his chosen career as a naval aviator, he began swimming in the sea to rebuild the strength in his arms—and discovered a new world. Almost everything else in his life grew out of that discovery. During World War II, in between espionage missions for the Resistance, Cousteau conducted experiments in underwater photography. After the war, he perfected the Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus (SCUBA), allowing him unprecedented freedom of movement underwater. His first glimpses of the undersea world, in a short film documenting shipwrecks, took the cinema world by storm. Cousteau sure-handedly built that success into an undersea empire, finding backers, acquiring and fitting out the Calypso, traveling the world’s oceans to create new films and developing new technology to allow even more spectacular diving feats. Matsen sketches the broad outlines of his career, but the inner Cousteau—by all accounts an intensely private man—never really emerges. In between accounts of the voyages, honors and growing environmental advocacy, we learn of family feuds, tragedies and Cousteau’s long-term affair with Francine Triplet, whom he married shortly after Simone’s death. Unfortunately, few of his close companions or family members appear in these pages, and those who do share little to reveal the man behind the mask.
Well short of definitive, but an entertaining summary of Cousteau’s life and career.Pub Date: Oct. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-42413-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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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