A delightful account of a marriage transformed into an extraordinary long-distance cycling partnership.
A memoir chronicling a couple’s devotion to long-distance bicycle touring on a global scale.
In 1997, California couple Anne Breedlove and Jim Eldredge were looking for something special to do for their 20th wedding anniversary when Anne came across an advertisement for self-guided cycling tours in southwestern France. Having spent their honeymoon in Europe, the couple decided to return to their beloved France. This time, they’d be riding on two wheels in the beautiful rural Dordogne region. Though neither was an experienced cycle tourer, the intrepid couple plunged into the journey with enthusiasm and returned home determined to make bike touring an integral part of their life together. This is an inspiring and consistently readable remembrance of the couple’s dedication to bike touring, a passion that’s taken them across the globe, from California to France, New Zealand, Hawaii, and other U.S. states including Maine, Arizona, and Idaho. Breedlove’s vivid prose carries readers through harsh but majestic landscapes and describes the physical and psychological toughness needed to successfully traverse such challenging terrain. Breedlove writes that facing unexpected challenges was part of what makes the life of a part-time nomad exciting: “The pacing, the grade, the wind, the distance, the weather—all are unknowns that can take us to our knees in seconds,” the author writes. In their travels, the couple never adopt an overly professional attitude toward cycle touring but simply bask in the sheer enjoyment of seeing the world up close at an 8 mph pace. Luckily, the author spends little time on the geeky minutiae of bicycling gear or long-winded descriptions of rigorous training plans. What comes across instead is a remarkable partnership, with Anne focusing on planning routes and places to stay and Jim handling all forms of bike maintenance and repair. In a book that includes maps of their routes and color photos of their experiences, readers will be swept up in the story of how two middle-aged working professionals managed to create such a deeply satisfying nomadic life.
A delightful account of a marriage transformed into an extraordinary long-distance cycling partnership.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2023
ISBN: 978-1631322037
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Advanced Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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