A fine tour d’horizon of our national grandeur.
A chronicle of the author’s year exploring all 59 national parks located in the United States and its territories.
Nursing a recent breakup with his fiancee, Emmy-winning CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Knighton hit upon an adventurous plan to take his mind off his troubles. He decided to visit every one of the country’s national parks, occasionally producing segments for CBS. Noting that the National Park Service manages more than 400 “units,” the author “decided to focus on the ‘official’ national parks. I knew I’d be excluding some amazing places, but it seemed like a more manageable list.” Knighton is a companionable guide, light on his feet, with a steady store of hit-or-miss jokes—during a visit with ancient trees in California’s White Mountains, he remarks, “Age on the inside isn’t always apparent on the outside. Just ask Keanu Reeves”—some excellent descriptive passages, good background material, and a few sweeping insights as to why national parks are so essential. The author groups a few parks together for each chapter according to a defining feature, which may be literal—trees, water, ice, volcanoes, caves, mountains—or something more abstract, such as God, forgiveness, love, or disconnection. Too infrequently, he tackles wider subjects with particular zest, especially so in the case of the lack of diversity in both visitors to and employees of the national parks. Knighton examines climate change through the disintegration of glaciers and then ponders the immensity of time through the cutting of a deep canyon. Every park presents him with some unique feature for him to celebrate: a synchronous display of firefly blinking, the knees of cypress trees, the uncanny blueness of Crater Lake. Then there is the elemental brilliance of the national park system. “Each one,” writes the author “is an example of how we have fought against our selfish, destructive impulses.”
A fine tour d’horizon of our national grandeur.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2354-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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