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WILDERNESS MOTHER

Name: WILDERNESS MOTHER
Author: Deanna Kawatski
ISBN: 1-55821-201-9

by Deanna Kawatski ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1994

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This is an unevenly told personal account of a woman who married and raised two children in the Canadian wilderness. Already something of an adventurer, author Kawatski was working alone as a firewatcher in a remote area of British Columbia, when she met the local ``hermit.'' The hermit, who turned out to be young and vital, became her husband. They stayed in the wilderness, building a home, growing vegetables, and trekking three miles to a highway to hitch a ride to the nearest town when they needed to collect mail or buy supplies. Kawatski delivered her first child, Natalia, on the floor of their cabin. The second, Ben, came along—in a hospital—five years later. With their parents, the children hiked and swam and skied, but they also learned about plants and animals, including an unruly rooster and a persistent wolf. The family survived fire, flood, and hordes of insects, mostly mosquitos. Even the Canadian bureaucracy, which tried to move them off the land, had to settle for a draw. Kawatski interspereses lists of flowers, trees, and wildlife with accounts of domestic triumphs like damming the creek to provide electricity for the cabin and a happy holiday dinner. The drudgery of doing laundry in the cold water of the creek was relieved by the epiphany of finding a hummingbird' nest and watching the bean-sized eggs hatch. What differentiates this book from the usual idyllic accounts of life away from civilization is that the Kawatskis didn't live happily ever after. After 13 years of a steadily deteriorating marriage, the author took her children and left her paradise. Moreover, at the time of her departure, lumber interests were clear-cutting the land around them and a highway was being designed to run right through their home. The highway was rerouted, but the idyll was over. Bruisingly honest, rich in the details of daily life, but with a paucity of insight that would give deeper meaning to this adventure. (B&w photographs—not seen)

Pub Date: April 1, 1994

ISBN: 1-55821-201-9

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Lyons Press

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994

Categories:

GENERAL HISTORY

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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TOMBSTONE

THE EARP BROTHERS, DOC HOLLIDAY, AND THE VENDETTA RIDE FROM HELL

by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.

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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.