A broad, insightful exploration of the Golden State’s pristine coastline and its social and ecological impact on the nation.
Award-winning journalist and environmental documentarian Helvarg (Saved By the Sea: A Love Story with Fish, 2010, etc.) incorporates his work as an ocean conservationist into this examination of the California coast. There’s a distinct passion evident in the author’s language as he writes about his home state, a populous land boasting more than 1,000 miles of “urban ocean and hidden wilderness coves, precipitous coastal cliffs, sea stacks and wild beaches.” Conveyed through interviews with commercial fishermen and scientists and excursions up and down the coast, Helvarg enthusiastically probes the heritage of California’s coastal tribes, its whaling and surfing legacies, and its vital symbiosis with the U.S. Navy—a fact, he writes, that many Southern Californians overlook. The author’s research included early morning excursions aboard marine container ships, diving boats and underwater exploratory science vessels, and he accompanied the San Diego Coast Guard’s nightly migrant patrol to scan for smugglers. Helvarg avoids debating the more usurious aspects of the California lifestyle in favor of praising its “biological richness and diversity, a hallmark of its coast and climate.” The author creates a detailed, handsome history lesson annotated with authoritative commentary on waterside conservation and preservation and climate awareness. In a cautionary final chapter, Helvarg warns of rising sea levels, a genuine ecological menace threatening the beauty and significance of California’s coastal landscapes.
A lush, labor-of-love appreciation of maritime California.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-312-66496-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | NATURE | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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