A young man charts the geography of his tumultuous childhood against the expansive backdrop of the Great Plains.
After his parents divorced, Garrett-Davis’ life was suddenly split between Pierre, S.D., and Portland, Ore. He spent much of his early years not only trying to process the abrupt dissolution of his family, but also keeping the secret of his mother’s lesbianism from the inherent backlash of South Dakota’s conservative culture. For years, the state’s right-wing governor, Bill Janklow, loomed like a flesh-and-bone boogeyman in the author’s mind. Despite the old hostilities, Garrett-Davis finds significant meaning in his home state’s “landscape of motion” and its long history of transient personalities. Deep sojourns into the weight and significance of nascent punk-rock record collections happily exist alongside intense observations about the demise of the great bison herds and even efforts to restart the Pleistocene epoch. Such meditations reach back further still, to the 65-million-year-old fossilized bones of a Tyrannosaurus Rex named Sue unearthed on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation in 1990. Hiding a mother’s true identity, enduring a father’s simmering hostility and resisting South Dakota’s often oppressive culture undoubtedly made life hard for the author in his intensely introspective youth. After becoming firmly established in his new life in the East, Garrett-Davis nevertheless finds himself gazing at the Bronx Zoo's captive bison, struggling to grasp the narrative of his own life on the Great Plains. He largely succeeds, recognizing that seemingly opposite concepts of leaving and returning, embracing and rejecting, building and destroying may not be as mutually exclusive as they seem.
Occasionally uneven in the narrative flow, but mostly profound and enjoyable reading.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-19984-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
Categories: HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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