A detailed and generally fair-minded portrait of a man whose talents should have earned him a higher place in history, but...
The skipper of the HMS Beagle gets his own book at last.
Nichols (A Voyage for Madmen, 2001, etc.) picks up Robert Fitzroy in 1828, at age 23, as he’s taking command of the Beagle after its captain’s suicide. A handsome aristocrat with a scientific mind, Fitzroy was dispatched to chart the Straits of Magellan, a tough but potentially rewarding assignment. Events set him on a new course when natives of Tierra del Fuego stole one of his boats; in retaliation, Fitzroy took four hostages. When the thieves failed to restore the boat, Fitzroy decided to bring the captives to England to be civilized and Christianized, then sent home to convert their compatriots. For this return voyage in 1831, Darwin joined the ship as onboard naturalist and companion to Fitzroy, whose family history of mental illness made him fear for his sanity in the stressful environment of Cape Horn. Their relationship was stormy, but in the end the Beagle circumnavigated the globe and gave Darwin the data for his theory of evolution. Back in England, the fortunes of the two men diverged. Lauded at first for his accurate charts, Fitzroy was also tagged by the Admiralty as difficult; he soon found himself with few prospects, while Darwin's reputation was made. Appointed governor of New Zealand, Fitzroy pleased no one in his efforts to soothe tense native-settler relations and was fired. Finally, as head of the British government’s Meteorological Office, he designed weather stations and charts that made available for the first time the raw material for weather forecasting. It appears to have been the London Times’ decision to stop publishing his forecasts that led him in 1865 to succumb at last to the family malady and cut his own throat.
A detailed and generally fair-minded portrait of a man whose talents should have earned him a higher place in history, but whose shortcomings reduced him a footnote.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-008877-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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