A call to action leavened by Chaplin's recollections of a long-gone way of life, when his parents were part of the Duke of...
When Chaplin (Research Associate/Academy of Natural Sciences; Dark Wind: A Survivor's Tale of Love and Loss, 1999, etc.) was invited to accompany an expedition to the Bahamas to see the coral reefs, he was overjoyed at the chance to relive boyhood memories.
In 2003, the author received a call from an associate curator at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, where his father's papers were archived, and was offered a chance to return to the idyllic scenes of his childhood. He had grown up on an island in the Bahamas that subsequently became the location of Paradise Beach and a magnet for tourists. Chaplin’s father was the author of the “771-page definitive work” Fishes of the Bahamas, and Chaplin had accompanied his father on many of his collecting trips. His memories would be invaluable for a planned 50-year retrospective on the state of the reefs and the fish they housed, she informed him. “We aim to go back to the original sites to make our own collections,” the ANS representative told him,” and you are the only person alive who knows exactly where they are.” The author, an advocate of sea conservation, put aside his own writing to join the project. During that trip and subsequent follow-ups, it was established that despite the effects of “[g]lobal warming, disease, bleaching, pollution, rampant algae, hurricanes, overfishing and overdiving,” which have caused severe coral degeneration and a reduction in the number of fish that populated them, species biodiversity is still intact. Nonetheless, he warns, unless measures are taken to reverse the degradation of the reefs, the “world's most diverse ecosystem will have been destroyed.”
A call to action leavened by Chaplin's recollections of a long-gone way of life, when his parents were part of the Duke of Windsor's social set on the Bahamas and he was a young boy sharing in his father's adventures at sea.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61145-895-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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