A protective love story of a place of vast, otherworldly beauty.
Alaska’s writer laureate explains how the state sets “the standards for what’s loveliest and most necessary in the world.”
Lord (Beluga Days: Tracking the Endangered White Whale, 2007, etc.) brings an impressive awareness to this collection of essays, which she humbly describes as “attempts to learn, to discover, to wander around in ideas as I try to reach understandings.” She characterizes Alaskans as self-inventers, restless yet comfortable with quiet and big, open spaces. The wilderness is full of intact landscapes and obvious linkages, writes the author, both in its natural systems and between the past and the present. In forays to old mining camps, forests wilting before the spruce bark beetle epidemic and well-isolated rookeries and islands, the author patiently waits for the landscape and its many stories to reveal themselves to her. Lord is also politically adept and sensitive, alert to threats like the “dysfunctional, irrelevant, and divisive” International Whaling Commission. She is in love with not just the wild, but the ways in which humans have interacted with it and recorded its dimensions for posterity. She closes with an ample display of her writing chops, allowing readers to take her measure as a well-rounded person—a baseball fan, the daughter of a father with Alzheimer’s and a believer in the elusive ivory-billed woodpecker, confided in a lovely staccato piece as jumpy as the bird’s alleged sighting.
A protective love story of a place of vast, otherworldly beauty.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8032-2515-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 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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