Two long shots, a blue-collar owner and his unlikely horse, make it to the top of the equestrian world.
Responding to the postwar American demand for farm labor, young Harry de Leyer emigrated from Holland and settled in Long Island, and his talent with horses earned him a job as riding master at an all-girls boarding school. Arriving late to an auction in 1956, he offered $80 for a flea-bitten, undernourished, gray gelding, already loaded onto a slaughterhouse truck. His kids dubbed the lumbering, 8-year-old former plow horse Snowman, and the animal’s sweet disposition made him a favorite among the Knox School’s novice riders. Indeed, de Leyer turned a small profit reselling Snowman to a neighbor seeking a docile mount for his daughter. Only when Snowman repeatedly jumped his paddock fence to return to de Leyer’s farm did the trainer belatedly recognize the horse’s hidden talent. In telling how de Leyer turned Snowman’s untapped potential into a two-time National Horse Show champion, novelist Letts (Family Planning, 2006, etc.) strains too hard to portray the story as an antidote to an era—economic downturn and nuclear dread notwithstanding, the late ’50s were hardly as desperate as she makes out—but she’s dead right about the unprecedented media environment—glossies and newspapers still flourished, TV was firmly established—that catapulted Snowman’s legend well beyond the privileged confines of the show-jumping aficionados. An experienced equestrienne, Letts perfectly understands the high-society horse world, the politics and the intricacies of the high-jump competitions and the challenges facing a low-budget arriviste. At its core, though, this is the story of de Leyer and Snowman, about the elusive qualities that make a champion jumper and the special gifts required to read a horse’s signals. Readers skittish around sentiment may balk, but Letts’ gentle touch proves entirely suitable to this genuinely sweet tale.
A heartwarming story begging for the Disney treatment.Pub Date: Aug. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-345-52108-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | SPORTS & RECREATION | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
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
Did you like this book?
An engaging, casual history of librarians and libraries and a famous one that burned down.
In her latest, New Yorker staff writer Orlean (Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, 2011, etc.) seeks to “tell about a place I love that doesn’t belong to me but feels like it is mine.” It’s the story of the Los Angeles Public Library, poet Charles Bukowski’s “wondrous place,” and what happened to it on April 29, 1986: It burned down. The fire raged “for more than seven hours and reached temperatures of 2000 degrees…more than one million books were burned or damaged.” Though nobody was killed, 22 people were injured, and it took more than 3 million gallons of water to put it out. One of the firefighters on the scene said, “We thought we were looking at the bowels of hell….It was surreal.” Besides telling the story of the historic library and its destruction, the author recounts the intense arson investigation and provides an in-depth biography of the troubled young man who was arrested for starting it, actor Harry Peak. Orlean reminds us that library fires have been around since the Library of Alexandria; during World War II, “the Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books.” She continues, “destroying a culture’s books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never happened.” The author also examines the library’s important role in the city since 1872 and the construction of the historic Goodhue Building in 1926. Orlean visited the current library and talked to many of the librarians, learning about their jobs and responsibilities, how libraries were a “solace in the Depression,” and the ongoing problems librarians face dealing with the homeless. The author speculates about Peak’s guilt but remains “confounded.” Maybe it was just an accident after all.
Bibliophiles will love this fact-filled, bookish journey.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4018-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
Did you like this book?
PERSPECTIVES
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2021 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
