A torturous and sometimes comical attempt to trace Coronado's 450-year-old footsteps through the deserts and mountains of the American Southwest. Preston (Dinosaurs in the Attic, 1986) and an impoverished but free-spirited photographer-friend hire a wrangler (who actually knows less about horses than they do) and set off, even after they've been discouraged by those familiar with the country. Arguing over matters large and small as they go, the two men learn en route—about horses from cowboys they meet; about thirst from the death they court. Expecting to make 25 miles a day, they make four—or none, because they're searching for their horses, which ran off during the night. And all the time, they're aware that they're headed for the despoblado, the ``howling wilderness'' that almost killed Coronado and his men. Preston and his friend end up on precipices too narrow to dismount; they're almost washed away by torrential rains; they grow discouraged and consider giving up the journey. Preston dreams of walking into fine clothing stores and is despondent when he awakens in the arid wilderness. But the two persevere and discover the awesome grandeur of nature, as well as something about themselves. And when they come upon the first of what the Spanish thought were the Seven Cities of Gold, they understand that those early explorers had found something even better than gold—they found food. Throughout, Preston recounts the narratives of Coronado's expedition and other historical accounts, including those of the Indians of the Southwest. A Blue Highways on horseback, well worth the trip. (Maps.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-73759-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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