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THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

THE POLAR REGIONS OF THE WORLD

Let's see. . . if you took all the books written by Isaac Asimov and placed them end to end, the line would reach from Broadway and Fourteenth Street to the orbit of maybe Jupiter. . . . Anyway, this is one of the best. Asimov organizes with determination rather than elegance. Oddly, the most obvious aspect of this subject (the history of Arctic and Antarctic exploration) is the most routinely handled. It's the maze of interconnected physical facts about the Poles that presents the greatest difficulties, and here Asimov is in his element. The climate of the Poles? It can't be understood without reference to the terrestrial shape, orbit, rotation, inclination of axis, atmosphere, and oceans. The Pole Star? It hasn't been the Pole Star forever, because of the precession of the equinoxes. Polar ice and glaciers? The Ice Ages? That brings in the atmosphere again and the problem of how its water content is affected by geographical features, causing different precipitation patterns—hence different glacial histories—at the North and South Poles. The aurora? That involves the earth's chemical composition, the still unsolved riddle of its magnetism, and the interaction of the solar wind with the ionosphere. Asimov is painstaking, clear, thorough (though it must be noted that at the end of a long discussion of everything imaginable about the aurora, he still hasn't gotten around to why it's visible) and as infectiously enthusiastic as a small child.

Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Weybright & Talley/McKay

Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1979

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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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