An engaging, evocative work, despite its split personality.
Sparks (Dreaming of Wolves, 2010) recalls trekking through the Carpathian Mountains in this memoir and history of Eastern Europe.
An expedition called “The Way of the Wolf” offers a 2,000-mile journey through the Carpathians from Romania to Germany. During the trek, a group of wildlife professionals and eco-volunteers take an inventory of wolves and other animals that inhabit the range, track their movements, and collect scat samples for analysis. It’s the brainchild of Peter Sürth, the chief wolf tracker and technician at the Carpathian Large Carnivore Project, whom the author met while volunteering for the organization in Transylvania (as described in his previous book). Sparks’ latest offering takes a similar tack, recounting the day-to-day experiences of the expedition’s support team, describing the sweeping vistas of the surrounding landscape, and offering razor-sharp vignettes of Slavic village life. These observations often have the roughness of diary entries, and herein lies their candid charm. During an evening stroll, for example, the author overhears “the riffs of Take Me Home, Country Roads booming from a neighboring house”; he notes wryly, “John Denver’s voice occasionally managed to transcend multi-gendered, Romanian-accented shouts, hoots, hollers, and screams that accompanied the familiar and comforting melody. Take me home indeed.” However, the author’s attempts to combine a travelogue with a walking history of the territory are less successful. The research is detailed, accurate, and supported by a wealth of secondary sources, and it brings to life the rich history of the Carpathians and its people. Yet the diary sections become swamped by long, unwieldy historical digressions. As a result, there’s a sense that there are two books on offer here, each with its own merits—one, a charmingly disheveled travel narrative; the other, a straight-laced historical thesis— and the author struggles but ultimately fails to make a seamless connection between the two. Still, this book, punctuated by stunning color photography, will attract those with an interest in wildlife and Eastern Europe.
An engaging, evocative work, despite its split personality.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Koehler Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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