Ridley has definitely done her homework in recognizing Baret as an overlooked but important historical figure.
Dense, inquisitive biography of the first woman to circle the globe by sea.
After learning about intrepid voyager Jeanne Baret (1740–1803), Ridley (English/Univ. of Louisville; Clara’s Grand Tour: Travels with a Rhinoceros in Eighteenth-Century Europe, 2005) was intrigued by their shared interest in botany and surprised at the lack of information available. Compelled to uncover the truth about her subject, Ridley scoured historical texts, personal journals, shipping logs and encyclopedias. Baret’s interest in naturalism blossomed early, and she eventually caught the eye of esteemed Parisian botanist Philibert Commerson, who became enamored by this “herb woman” and her botanical wisdom. In 1766, Commerson joined French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville on the first world circumnavigation expedition, which was staffed with 330 men. Anxious to join him in collecting floras of the worlds, Baret bound her chest, cross-dressed, donned a pistol and covertly enlisted as Commerson’s male servant—though, Ridley asserts, Commerson was well aware of the arrangement. Tolerating ravaging seasickness and unpredictable weather patterns, Baret was able to blend in with the crew (she claimed to be a eunuch) and reveled in discovering new plant species. However, upon reaching Tahiti in 1768, she was nearly gang-raped by native islanders who saw through her disguise. Ridley points out implausible discrepancies in Baret’s accounting of her voyage versus what was dictated into the logs of seamen who worked with her on the ships. She also expresses skepticism about Commerson’s naïveté, demonstrating that many of Baret’s crewmates were already aware of her gender but were wary to “rock the boat.” Dual themes of feminism and sexual equality anchor the author’s scholarly analysis as Baret reportedly remained ever-fearful of exposure, which would have placed Commerson and Bougainville’s respective reputations in jeopardy at a time when “a female stowaway was a curiosity, but a female botanist was a breach in the natural order of things.”
Ridley has definitely done her homework in recognizing Baret as an overlooked but important historical figure.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-46352-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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