A pitch-perfect memoir, skirting sentimentality as it embraces sentiment, getting at nature’s marvel and its endless...
Naturalist/writer Carroll (Swampwalker’s Journal, 1999, etc.) reveals all the touchstones that turned him from a Turtle Boy to a Turtle Man.
At the age of eight, the author came across his first wild turtle, first swamp, first real border: “For some time I stood still, absorbing, becoming absorbed. A shivering intensity came over me.” With a Golden Nature Book as his grail map, Carroll takes to the wetlands, barely containing himself at the rush of spring thaw and honing the focus he will need to really see even a fragment of what is there. A spotted turtle becomes his all and only during the early days, and he conveys with enough oomph the effect it has on his sensibilities to make it seem utterly natural that a native place name for this continent is Turtle Island. But turtles will not be his only fixation; art will also help him make the connection he wants with the raw world. He traces the trajectory of his life, as true as a well-fletched arrow: the economic wretchedness of an artist scraping by, the moves throughout New Hampshire as he seeks employment, the melding of his painting and drawing with his avocation (and the influences that draw him in other directions as well), the feeling of being a square peg in a round hole, at odds with more conservative elements. Everywhere he goes, he finds bogs and backwaters and turtles—spotted, painted, wood, box, Blanding’s, and snapping. An episode with a 4 ½-foot, 46-pound behemoth of the last-mentioned variety will give readers who have any familiarity with the creature an inkling of the author’s fine madness. Throughout, his words have the ping of authenticity; Carroll is an environmentalist who lives the word right down to his wet sneakers.
A pitch-perfect memoir, skirting sentimentality as it embraces sentiment, getting at nature’s marvel and its endless transfigurations. (40 b&w line drawings and halftones by the author)Pub Date: March 11, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-16225-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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
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
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