History at its most exciting and revealing.
A dense but enlightening history of a highly significant 18th-century vessel.
Moore (Creative Writing/Univ. of London and Univ. of Oxford; The Weather Experiment: The Pioneers Who Sought to See the Future, 2015, etc.) goes well beyond simple history or a mere tracking of the Endeavour’s exploits. Though the minutiae may seem daunting at first, readers should stick with it, as the narrative transforms into a page-turning, breathtaking adventure story for the ages. Built in 1764 and initially christened the Earl of Pembroke, the ship was flat-bottomed and featured an open hold, reinforced hull, and bulldog nose that was designed for strength rather than beauty. Her first life was as a collier, transporting coal to London. Enter Alexander Dalrymple, long a student of the South Seas, who was determined to find the southern continent, Terra Australis. The Royal Society appointed him as observer of the expected 1769 transit of Venus across the sun. The king’s funding made this an Admiralty voyage, which required a naval captain; officials didn’t choose Dalrymple, but they used his plans. James Cook would take the helm of the now renamed Endeavour, accompanied by naturalist Joseph Banks, who was well-versed in Carl Linnaeus’ new taxonomy system, and artist Sydney Parkinson. Idyllic days in Tahiti were followed by a complete circumnavigation and mapping of New Zealand and parts of Australia’s coast. The reactions to the ship’s arrival varied from distrust to fear to belligerence to aloofness. Her sudden discovery of the Great Barrier Reef illustrates just how perfect ship and captain were for the job. Among the many other discoveries thrillingly recounted by Moore: birds, fish, arthropods, and more than 30,000 botanical specimens. In her third life, the Endeavour made a series of journeys to the Falklands. As the author notes, “her biography roams across the history of the time, binding into a single narrative diverse moments of true historical significance.”
History at its most exciting and revealing.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-14841-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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