Given that the fight continues to protect wild horses and ban the slaughter of horses of whatever kind, this book is timely,...
Modest tale of a scrappy advocate for wild horses and her three-decade battle for their protection.
Canadian writers Cruise and Griffiths (co-authors: Vancouver: A Novel, 2003, etc.) seem a touch surprised at the total package that was Velma Johnston, a secretary turned cage-rattler. She was stricken by polio at an early age, drank copiously, smoked constantly and seemed unafraid of anything. Her husband was a cowboy and bar-brawler, yet a lover of poetry, one of the “literary cowpokes.” Johnston was converted from a Nevada ranch wife who shared her neighbors’ views that the wild horses that populated the remote canyons of the Sierra were enemies in a long war of broken fences and raided herds. Her road-to-Damascus moment came when she witnessed the aftermath of a round-up in which battered mustangs were herded onto trucks to be slaughtered for dog food. She enlisted like-minded Nevadans and outsiders such as photographer Gus Bundy, who documented fearfully abusive hunts for wild horses from pickup trucks and helicopters, and later the writer Marguerite Henry. Johnston eventually took her fight to Washington, D.C., where she recruited still more unlikely allies. One of the virtues of the authors’ account is its look at how libertarian conservatives such as Manchester Guardian publisher William Loeb and Dixiecrat politico Walter Baring helped advance her cause—and how Johnston eventually secured Dwight Eisenhower’s signature on a protective law known as the “Wild Horse Annie bill” that she then fought, for many years, to put teeth in.
Given that the fight continues to protect wild horses and ban the slaughter of horses of whatever kind, this book is timely, though it pales next to Deanne Stillman’s Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West (2008).Pub Date: March 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5335-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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 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
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