The grand but failed scheme to make reindeer the camels of the north is in itself a story that deserves to be better known,...
As the subtitle suggests, there are multiple threads to this well-documented account of courage and chicanery in the Arctic.
Taliaferro (Tarzan Forever, 1999, etc.), a former senior editor at Newsweek, has packed his story with a host of vivid characters: dedicated and not-so-dedicated missionaries, wheelers and dealers, sea captains, politicos, stranded whalers, Lapp reindeer herders, goldminers and beleaguered Alaskan natives. Central to all this are the amazingly sturdy and resourceful Lopps, Tom and Ellen. Unfazed by the murder of another missionary, they try to bring both Christianity and a better life to the Alaskan natives around Cape Prince of Wales. Sheldon Jackson, the general agent for education in Alaska, had proposed importing trainable reindeer, along with Lapp reindeer herders, from Europe, at first to improve the lot of the caribou-hunting Alaskan natives, but later as part of a grand plan to provide mail service and transportation for white settlers. This plan was well under way when, in 1897, a group of whaling ships became ice-bound in the Arctic Ocean. With their crews believed to be on the brink of starvation, San Francisco newspapers demanded that the federal government act, and subsequently Treasury Secretary Gage authorized the captain of a Revenue Cutter Service ship to contact Lopp and persuade him to drive his large herd of reindeer several hundred miles north in the dead of winter to come to the aid of the whalers. Taliaferro weaves into one highly readable story the travails of this Overland Relief Expedition, the life of plucky Ellen Lopp and her ever-growing brood of little Lopps, the tale of the stranded but definitely not starving whalers and the concurrent gold rush that was to change Alaska forever.
The grand but failed scheme to make reindeer the camels of the north is in itself a story that deserves to be better known, and Taliaferro does it justice.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-58648-221-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2006
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
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
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