A fresh, occasionally biting report from the early days of a mustang sanctuary.
With the assistance of literary publicist and author Sneyd, rancher Day (co-author, with sister Sandra Day O’Connor: Lazy B: Growing Up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest, 2002, etc.) delivers a lively report of his four years tending 1,500 unadoptable wild mustangs.
When Day embarked on a project to release a large herd of wild mustangs that had been rounded up by the Bureau of Land Management, it was uncharted territory. The author had recently acquired 35,000 acres of undulating grassland prairie in southern South Dakota that he felt was ideal for turning out the horses to roam. In a warm, salt-of-the-earth manner—“Good luck had stuffed itself in my pocket long ago, and adventure had been my friend since I was old enough to scramble on the back of Chico...trying my five-year-old darnedest to keep up with the big cowboys”—Day recounts how he was able to get the BLM, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Congress to support the program. Soon, he found himself with a rambunctious collection of mustang rejects. Day passionately explains what it is like to learn ranching in the Sand Hills and how to tame the wild horses, which, under their normal conditions, would prefer to have little to do with humans—e.g., when Kevin Costner dropped by to see if Mustang Meadow Ranch would be suitable for filming part of Dances with Wolves, upsetting the horses in the process: “A few horses started pawing the ground. They began to vibrate like a hive of irritated bees, their heads now alert, their tails swishing….Within a minute, the herd was stampeding.” There was an ugly finale to the project but not before Day brought to life the ranch and its wild array of flora and fauna.
A fresh, occasionally biting report from the early days of a mustang sanctuary.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8032-5335-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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