A work in progress, but remarkably diverting if even so short a distance down Morton’s road.
Marine mammal researcher Morton, who’s been on the hydrophone listening closely to dolphins and killer whales for 25 years, reports on her work and life among the orcas thus far.
Morton’s association with marine mammals began under the guidance of John Lilly, perhaps best known for his dabbling with LSD, though he was also a pioneering, unconventional scientist working with dolphins. Those days not only fired within her a desire to pursue marine mammal vocalization studies, but it also opened doors to the insular world of cetacean research, a field in which Morton has no advanced degree and as such is often branded an untouchable. She worked in California with captive creatures, concentrating on the correlation between sounds and behavior, before realizing that her interests lay in work with wild animals: it was more vigorous, certainly; it also soothed her conscience, for she had begun to appreciate captivity to be a dreadful state for an orca. In plainspoken prose, Morton relates her work afield, eventually moving to Canada and concentrating on differentiation between transient and resident populations of orcas. She writes of her personal life with unembroidered ease as well, which is extremely powerful when telling the story of the death of her husband and co-worker Robin, who drowned. The tone is equally effective when spinning out less traumatic anecdotes, as when she and her husband—running through bad weather in their skiff, their cameras being kept dry in big green garbage bags—are targeted by the Mounties as drug-runners. Her concern for the orcas’ welfare leads her to investigate pollution of their habitat and in particular the degradation of their food source, part of which is identified as the damage done to wild stocks of salmon by the penned salmon of aquaculturists, the old bugbear of wild vs. captive rearing its head once more.
A work in progress, but remarkably diverting if even so short a distance down Morton’s road.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-345-43794-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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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