An impressively researched but tonally and structurally uneven work that loses its fascinating subject in the details.
An account of a 17th-century American woman who was charged with witchcraft.
Even history buffs may have missed the curious tale of Unise Cole, an early American settler who was repeatedly accused of being a witch during her years in Hampton, New Hampshire, in the 1600s. Cole was publicly whipped, set in stocks, and put on trial twice in her lifetime, but ultimately never executed for her supposed crimes. She remained such a local legend over the years that the town publicly exonerated her on its 300th anniversary in 1938. To date, she’s been the subject of radio dramas, poems, and even a 2013 album by the rock band Telergy, featuring Twisted Sister’s singer/songwriter Dee Snider. It’s the kind of story that writes itself, but despite a thorough amount of research, Lassiter (The Mark of Goody Cole, 2014, etc.) stumbles in the execution. An author’s note alerts readers that this is a work of “creative nonfiction,” meaning that she’s expanded or imagined scenes where the historical record fails. It’s an interesting, potentially perfect approach to this bizarre story, except that it lends the book a jarring tone; it shifts at breakneck speed from clinical reporting of the historical record to flowery, overly descriptive scenes of Goody Cole and her suspicious neighbors. This choice also results in occasional, weirdly archaic asides (such as a description of one person as “feeling stronger in spirit but still as weak as a day-old shoat”). There’s even inexplicable editorializing, as when Lassiter offers “condolences” to William Cole, Unise’s husband, for staying married to his troublesome wife for three decades. More problematic is the book’s overall structure and organization. To give readers a complete understanding of Cole’s world, Lassiter provides exhaustive, impressively sourced records of each neighbor and town tragedy, and each instance of persecution of local Quakers and clashes with Native Americans. But this account frequently loses sight of Unise herself, and only flimsily connects her life story to wider themes of paranoia and hysteria in the Puritan community. Although early America enthusiasts will jump at the chance to read more about pre-Salem witchcraft trials, this book doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its subject.
An impressively researched but tonally and structurally uneven work that loses its fascinating subject in the details.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5193-5730-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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