A captivating homage to a wilderness sanctuary marked but not spoiled by human presence.
Generations of inhabitants who revered and defended a sylvan California setting are commemorated in Brovarney’s nonfiction history.
The author, a former curator at the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah, California, celebrates Lake Leonard, a pristine body of water nestled amid the mountains and streams of Reeves Canyon in Mendocino County. She begins by surveying the natural history of the area, which is dominated by old-growth redwood trees big enough to generate their own microclimates and shelter a menagerie of fauna, from salamanders to mountain lions. She also discusses the local Pomo Indian culture. Brovarney then profiles the families who owned Lake Leonard and its environs from the 19th century to the present, focusing on two iconic women. The first is Una Boyle, who summered at the lake as a girl and lived there full time for 30 years, beginning in 1921; she escaped from a convent at the age of 13 and later became an amateur rodeo rider. The second is Boyle’s neighbor Hazel Dickinson Putnam, a riding instructor who greeted trespassers on her 200 acres with a loaded gun and lived by the motto, “I don’t shoot to threaten, I shoot to kill.” The author sets these stories against the inexorable encroachment of logging into the area, which obliterated surrounding forests but spared Lake Leonard’s vicinity thanks to its proprietors’ conservationist efforts (one owner saved a favorite redwood by telling the lumberjacks that it was on her land—and then bought the property the next day). Brovarney deftly mixes regional history, ecology, and character studies of people who shaped and were shaped by the land, writing in lucid, workmanlike prose dotted with flights of vivid lyricism: “An ancient redwood forest dwells deep in our sense long after we leave it—a cool stillness, the pungent sweet-citrus scent born of sun-heated sap, soft duff underfoot, duskiness broken by slender streams of light, the crystalline song of a hermit thrush.” The book’s many photos, some a century old, give an equally evocative sense of the primeval forest, its vast, corrugated redwoods dwarfing the people beside them.
A captivating homage to a wilderness sanctuary marked but not spoiled by human presence.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 9798218021429
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Landcestry
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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