A crazed professional poacher and the elephant who smashed his leg 50 years before meet again in this brutal, melodramatic sequel to The Place of Lions (1991). In his hidden storeroom on the lifeless volcanic slopes of Tanzania’s Ol Doinyo Lengai, Laurens van der Wel has gathered thousands of tusks, but his special prey, known to the Masai as Papa Tembo, “Father Elephant,” remains elusive. About to slaughter another elephant family, van der Wel suddenly herds them instead into a close and torches it, sure that their screams will draw Papa Tembo, which they do. The prose is often colorful—“Only the carrion eaters had done well that year, the sly hyenas and gargoyle vultures lazily plying their putrescent trade”—but Campbell’s generalizations about Africa (e.g., “A world of magic and ancient savagery where life meant little,”) evoke a now-musty colonialism, and he adds characters more for didactic purposes than to enhance the plot: a scientist and his two teenage children to observe—at length—elephant behavior, and a pair of anti-poacher vigilantes from the previous book. They all come together in the smoke-filled climax in which Papa Tembo crushes the slobbering, gun-waving van der Wel into a pulp, then calmly allows the other humans to help the captured elephants escape. A long and tumid story, with little to see readers through beyond some lurid writing and, for those with a proclivity for such carnage, the expectation of gory just deserts. (glossary) (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-201727-5
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Paulsen recalls personal experiences that he incorporated into Hatchet (1987) and its three sequels, from savage attacks by moose and mosquitoes to watching helplessly as a heart-attack victim dies. As usual, his real adventures are every bit as vivid and hair-raising as those in his fiction, and he relates them with relish—discoursing on “The Fine Art of Wilderness Nutrition,” for instance: “Something that you would never consider eating, something completely repulsive and ugly and disgusting, something so gross it would make you vomit just looking at it, becomes absolutely delicious if you’re starving.” Specific examples follow, to prove that he knows whereof he writes. The author adds incidents from his Iditarod races, describes how he made, then learned to hunt with, bow and arrow, then closes with methods of cooking outdoors sans pots or pans. It’s a patchwork, but an entertaining one, and as likely to win him new fans as to answer questions from his old ones. (Autobiography. 10-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-32650-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones. (Autobiographical fiction. 11-13)
An exhilarating summer marked by death, gore and fire sparks deep thoughts in a small-town lad not uncoincidentally named “Jack Gantos.”
The gore is all Jack’s, which to his continuing embarrassment “would spray out of my nose holes like dragon flames” whenever anything exciting or upsetting happens. And that would be on every other page, seemingly, as even though Jack’s feuding parents unite to ground him for the summer after several mishaps, he does get out. He mixes with the undertaker’s daughter, a band of Hell’s Angels out to exact fiery revenge for a member flattened in town by a truck and, especially, with arthritic neighbor Miss Volker, for whom he furnishes the “hired hands” that transcribe what becomes a series of impassioned obituaries for the local paper as elderly town residents suddenly begin passing on in rapid succession. Eventually the unusual body count draws the—justified, as it turns out—attention of the police. Ultimately, the obits and the many Landmark Books that Jack reads (this is 1962) in his hours of confinement all combine in his head to broaden his perspective about both history in general and the slow decline his own town is experiencing.
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones. (Autobiographical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-37993-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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