A flawed yet engaging and informative on-the-ground travel guide.
A former wilderness guide recalls working in the Florida Everglades in this passionate if at times crude travel guide–cum-memoir.
In his debut, Mitchell recounts taking waves of anxious tourists through the alligator-infested waters of the Everglades. The book is shaped into a series of tours through the national park, punctuated by humorous anecdotes along the way. A former IT security specialist from the Isle of Wight, Mitchell lived and worked at the Everglades International Hostel offering various immersion excursions to the guests. Many of the tours described are on foot, walking knee-deep in water. In true tour-guide fashion, Mitchell leads readers step by step through this alien landscape, describing flora and fauna along the way. He warns of saw grass that can “shred your clothing and skin,” the infamous and highly venomous cottonmouth snake, and, of course, the American alligator, the “keeper of the glades.” Mitchell has a keen eye for topography, and some of the most fascinating descriptions come in the shape of the various cypress domes that dot the park. These ponds, below a tree canopy that forms the shape of a dome, house a variety of wildlife and are foreboding to enter. Mitchell describes tourists blanching at the sight of a resident alligator or screaming as turtles brush by their ankles. In the preface to the book, Mitchell says, “The Everglades are a wild and poetic landscape that is largely indescribable,” yet he compensates with stunning color photographs and a wealth of background information. The book is, however, prone to repetition. For instance, Mitchell twice describes the differences between an alligator and a crocodile, and he repeatedly refers to how touching some wildlife in the park is deemed “harassment.” A few of his anecdotes might be considered puerile—forever the prankster, he describes putting his own feces beneath the pillow of a colleague—and indeed, such anecdotes are mostly unnecessary and muddy the tone of a perfectly readable travel guide, limiting the book’s audience in the process.
A flawed yet engaging and informative on-the-ground travel guide.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4996-0684-3
Page Count: 276
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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