In her 14th work of fiction, Bainbridge (An Awfully Big Adventure, 1991, etc.) reconstructs that most poignant of ill-fated journeys, Scott's 1912 South Pole expedition, in the voices of the five explorers who reached the Pole and died soon afterwards. The three-year trip was designed as a scientific expedition as well as a conquest of the Pole. In 1910 the Terra Nova, a converted whaling ship, was seen off with great fanfare in London and Cardiff. Bainbridge imagines an ebullient shipboard mood as the officers play schoolboy games in the wardroom, while in their quieter moments the younger officers fret over whether they are up to the challenge. In fact, they endure uncomplainingly the antarctic cold, treacherous terrain, and round-the-clock midwinter dark. (Bainbridge writes as though she'd traveled every numbing mile herself). These are God-fearing men, exulting in the chance ``to stand up and be counted'' for king and country, yet never mere caricatures of muscular Christianity. Bainbridge gives us five well-differentiated individuals. Especially complex is their leader, ``Con'' Scott, a disciplined yet big-hearted Royal Navy man who for a second loses control, yearning for a shootout, when he hears that Norwegian Roald Amundsen is ahead of them in the race. Sure enough, after a hellish final trek, Scott and company find a Norwegian flag at the Pole. Bainbridge ends her account with team member Oates, filled with morphine, making his celebrated stoic exit into the blizzard. Departing from contemporary woes, Bainbridge has found gold in the dreams of the last big-time explorers unaided by technology. A triumph of sympathetic imagination.
Pub Date: April 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-7867-0071-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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