The feral escapades of a creative wunderkind stitched together with novelistic zeal.
Lively biography of an award-winning 19th-century taxidermist.
Carl Akeley (1864–1926) began his career as a nature-loving natural-history museum apprentice in New York “skinning birds” for ladies’ hats. He soon became disillusioned after being viewed as a loafer, repeatedly sabotaged by others in his field or fired. Kirk (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pennsylvania) skillfully illuminates an era that saw “a dawning sensitivity to the plight of wildlife” as Akeley went relatively unnoticed until several of his best pieces were being sold at premium prices by the same museum curator who’d terminated him. His ascent to greatness began to take hold in 1886 when, after relocating to Wisconsin and then Chicago, Akeley exercised his burgeoning technical skill by creating an exclusive habitat diorama using cement casts, wooden pedestals and iron rods. He also developed a particularly rare skill with papier mache, used to fashion even more “eerily lifelike” exhibits. With footnotes and photographs, Kirk steers his consistently entertaining narrative away from Akeley’s in-house work to focus on the taxidermist’s many years spent adventuring on safari in the African jungle with dignitaries like Theodore Roosevelt. These tantalizing expeditions challenged Akeley, who seemed drawn to working with elephants and gorillas, but never prepared him for the dangers of the call of the wild. The author shines in his reanimation of Africa’s inherent dangers as Akeley risked his life on safari battling ravenous leopards, charging elephants, five-hour hikes without rations and debilitating fevers—including the one that would take his life in 1926.
The feral escapades of a creative wunderkind stitched together with novelistic zeal.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9282-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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
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
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