A genuine adventure that often reads more like a report than a story.
A scientist looks back at his fascinating career and offers a pointed critique of mainstream conservation organizations.
As a graduate student in tropical biology at the University of Miami, Mack decided to conduct research on cassowaries—flightless birds that live primarily in the isolated rain forests of New Guinea. He traveled to Papua New Guinea, a country with over 800 tribal groups, a massive expanse of unbroken rain forest and hardly any established research facilities. It was a good fit for someone who finds “a sure thing boring.” Mack’s memoir recounts the two decades he spent in this remote, captivating land, from his pilot study in 1987 to his abrupt exit in 2007. Chapter by chapter, he inched up the ladder of his dreams by finding a study site teeming with pekpek (the Tok Pisin word for cassowary excrement) and eventually building a field research station with the Pawai’ia tribe. Later, he and Deb Wright, his wife at the time, teamed up with the Wildlife Conservation Society and developed a program based in Goroka that trained Papua New Guinean students to become conservation professionals. He encountered hardship every step of the way—life-threatening diseases, harrowing helicopter rides, testy tribal power struggles, flash floods and flesh-eating microbes, just to name a few. Readers looking for character development or suspense won’t find much here; there’s more insight into the plants and animals Mack observed than the people around him, and most of the major plot developments are plainly stated in the chapter’s titles. What emerges, however, is a hard-earned conservation manifesto: Mack believes the only sustainable conservation practices are those that focus on “capacity building,” the training of local citizens to manage their own country’s natural resources without long-term dependence on foreign expertise. It’s a convincing outlook, but with a tone that mixes bitterness, humor and pride, Mack sullies his argument by portraying the leaders of “Big Conservation” as perpetually clueless and shortsighted. Nevertheless, the book affords readers an impressive look at what can be accomplished with dogged determination and the right partners.
A genuine adventure that often reads more like a report than a story.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9893903-0-9
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Cassowary Conservation & Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: April 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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