A scruffy take on female adventure travel.
A harrowing memoir about a mother who set out to visit former war zones in a Land Rover with her 3-year-old daughter.
When she was 16, Shinn lost both her legs below the knee after an initially misdiagnosed bout of bacterial meningitis that left her with a large malpractice settlement from the hospital. Fitted with prostheses but missing the kind of running that had given structure to her high school life, she took up off-road driving. In her late 20s, in 2001, divorced and with a young child, she decided to spend some of her settlement on a trip with her daughter, Celie, to raise awareness of the impact of land mines. Her plan was to visit Bosnia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Vietnam, and El Salvador. After she had spent a year in England interning at a Land Rover training school, she and a friend drove her Land Rover through Bosnia, leaving Celie with the girl's father. After that, she and Celie spend the rest of their time in a little town in Greece, where Shinn got pregnant. The narrative alternates between Shinn's misadventures during the trip, some of which are bound to leave readers worrying about Celie's welfare, and her memories of the past, when she was raised by an adoptive family she describes as abusive. While readers may disapprove of some of Shinn’s actions, she gives us plenty of memorable scenes and characters, including an overnight stay in a brothel, the friends she made and lost along the way, her run-ins with the law, and her near-death experiences while precariously driving the Land Rover. To the author’s credit, she doesn't pretend to have accomplished more than she did, and she doesn't sugarcoat her many mistakes. Readers may not want to follow in her footsteps, but they will never be bored with her as a companion.
A scruffy take on female adventure travel.Pub Date: June 1, 2023
ISBN: 9781952271861
Page Count: 296
Publisher: West Virginia Univ. Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
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 virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
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