Powerful reading for the quadricentennial of Hudson’s legendary voyage.
An unexpected portrayal of America in the decline of industry, delivered from the unique vantage point of the Hudson River.
Fireboat engineer and journalist DuLong first laid eyes on the Hudson through the windows of the Empire State Building while working at her cushy dot-com job. After volunteering aboard the John J. Harvey in 2001, she entered into an intoxicating love affair with workboats, industry and labor that would drastically change her life. Her fascination with the fireboat’s history escalated into an obsession with the Hudson River, whose industries were a significant factor in the early development of America. After getting laid off from her job, DuLong gave her life to physical work on the water, and over time she became one of the only female fireboat engineers in the world. As her personal adventure on the Hudson unfolds, she paints an eye-opening picture of what America has been—a country of bootstrap entrepreneurs and hands-on laborers—and what it is becoming, awash in the decay of industry, a faltering economy and the regression of human innovation. Through stories of those who still toil with their hands and who preserve and share the past, the author illustrates how a nation always on the cutting edge of technology may actually be moving backward, losing the facilities and knowledge to produce everyday goods and increasingly relying on foreign exports.
Powerful reading for the quadricentennial of Hudson’s legendary voyage.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-8698-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
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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