by Kate Jackson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2008
A colorful account of field biology and essential reading for aspiring herpetologists.
A Harvard post-doc goes snake hunting in Africa.
Jackson’s scientific report on her survey of amphibians and reptiles in the Republic of Congo appeared last year in the online journal Herpetological Conservation and Biology. This delightful and informative book tells the rest of her story: the bureaucratic delays, insect infestations, difficulties with local people and other unexpected events during the two rainy seasons she spent collecting specimens in the little-studied swamp forest of the northern Congo. With funding from the Smithsonian, Jackson (Biology/Whitman Coll.) arrived in Brazzaville, obtained supplies and guides and set up camp outside the Lac Télé Reserve (permits to work inside the reserve never arrived) with an elderly cook and a moody 24-year-old guide. Waist-deep at times in the flooded forest, surrounded by large ants and tsetse flies, Jackson grew desperate when she was unable to find many frogs and snakes; happily, she was able to purchase more than enough specimens from the villagers, who bring them to her camp. Drawing on her journal, the author recreates the flow of her days: nocturnal frog searches, encounters with cobras, the preservation of specimens and overlong visits from curious neighbors. She also offers glimpses of the many ways—most of them ineffective—that villagers treat snakebites. (Some 20,000 Africans die each year from the bites of venomous snakes.) Just as she was planning her return home to Toronto, looking forward to some privacy in which to nurse her blistered feet and swollen ankles, Jackson found she had to leave behind more than 100 preserved animals; nothing containing DNA was permitted on a passenger plane. (The specimens flew later by DHL courier.) It took a year to prepare for her second expedition, which took her into the reserve for a month. This visit ended spectacularly—a cobra bit Jackson just days before she was scheduled to break camp.
A colorful account of field biology and essential reading for aspiring herpetologists.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-674-02974-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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