Literate prose and a naturalist’s sensibility: a better tour guide would be hard to imagine.
The deepest northern woods or most barren Alaskan wilderness vibrate with life under award-winning journalist Hildebrand’s discerning eye.
It may be the rainwater oozing up from boggy Minnesota farmland under a visitor’s footsteps. Or the “heart-shaped” tracks of white-tailed deer in the Wisconsin forest. Or the shimmering shapes of sockeye salmon heading upstream under a canoe on the Yukon. In 18 old and new essays, Hildebrand (Mapping the Farm, 1995, etc.) couples eerily beautiful natural landscapes with a sense of their fragility. The writing is heartfelt, but there’s no preachiness. For the most part, Hildebrand lets nature do the talking. True, the older essays can feel dated. “Exile's Song” paints an Ireland beset with economic despair and a fleeing population—obviously written before a high-tech invasion transformed Ireland into the “Celtic Tiger” of the last decade. In other cases, though, even the older essays carry a powerful emotional kick. In “Snow on the Mountains,” Hildebrand returns to a remote cabin he and his young bride built in 1972 along Alaska’s Stampede Trail. The marriage dissolved within a few years (after a premature baby died in childbirth), and, returning in 1976, the author finds a strange mixture of regret and solace in the achingly beautiful morning that breaks around his isolation. Hildebrand brings a serenity to the wilderness, and also a sense of literary history. He leads us to Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and through the same Minnesota prairie that Thoreau, dying of tuberculosis, walked on his final journey in 1843. On California’s Pacific Coast Highway, he mourns our passing from a country of travel-hungry Jack Kerouacs to sedentary Garrison Keillors, now willingly tethered to our “hometowns.” Indeed, whether uncovering Laotian exiles in Minnesota or ancient Indians in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge, Hildebrand proves as adept at unearthing the compelling human story as he is at penetrating nature’s subtleties.
Literate prose and a naturalist’s sensibility: a better tour guide would be hard to imagine.Pub Date: May 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-87351-528-5
Page Count: 5
Publisher: Borealis Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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