A small survey of many virtues; it holds to the middle ground between hagiography and debunking, making allowances for...
Hero or opportunist? Rebel or terrorist? Did he even own a coonskin cap? Davy Crockett was an enigma in his own age—and certainly the right man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Retired New York City firefighter Groneman, a veteran of the 9/11 attacks, recognizes that a vast mythmaking enterprise underlay Davy Crockett’s ascent to the status of cultural hero; one series, Davy Crockett’s Almanacs, ran to 45 volumes “of increasingly violent tall tales” and was wildly successful, though, Groneman notes, Crockett made nothing from it. His elevation seems unlikely, for Crockett started off life under a father no more violent or drunk than most fathers on the Appalachian frontier, showed no more aptitude for hard work than any of his peers and commanded no more book-learning than a farmer or freighter or trapper. Still, he distinguished himself by a certain stoical unflappability under fire and good humor, which, witnesses recall, he put to good use during the defense of the Alamo, which sealed his reputation once and for all. The mythmaking, too, was a product of its time, for Crockett happened to come along just when the Founding Fathers were dying off and “the American identity was shifting from the Virginia aristocracy to the common man of the Western frontier.” In this lean an lucid biography, Groneman portrays more of the complicated, haunted David Crockett that Billy Bob Thornton did in the 2004 film The Alamo than did Fess Parker in the 1950s. And as for the coonskin cap—yes, he wore one.
A small survey of many virtues; it holds to the middle ground between hagiography and debunking, making allowances for Crockett’s lapses into bad behavior while highlighting his better qualities.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-765-31067-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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