A thoroughly engaging account of a modern-day adventurer in the Alaskan backcountry—with spiritual elements mixed in.
A bush pilot relates his many encounters with his guardian angel in Alaska.
Bingman’s debut book is a fast-paced and ultimately winning combination of backwoods adventure yarns and personal faith journey centering on his audacious life as a bush pilot, fisherman, and jack-of-all-trades in the Alaskan wilderness. But the heart of the work is his accounts of his relationship with an angel simply named Joe. The escapades are told with smooth storytelling confidence that should appeal to armchair sports enthusiasts. The author comes from a family of pilots and risk-takers and he gives the impression of having found his real spiritual home in the Alaskan woods, where so many aviators have lived before him. “The back country of Alaska,” he tells his readers, “is riddled with twisted metal that once flew to that very spot and is now just someone’s story, slowly fading away.” But Bingman’s own tales are set apart by the presence of Joe, who turns up for conversations and moments of insight and almost always gives the author a feeling of companionship he wants to share with his readers. He hopes readers will “reflect on subtle miracles that have happened in your life and, with God’s help, start to realize that you are never truly alone.” Christian audiences will no doubt find some of Bingman’s Joe stories familiar to their own experiences, although more skeptical readers will likely wonder about some of the details. For instance, when a charging bear changes course at the last minute in the Ugashik district, the author thanks Joe “for being there for me when I needed him most.” But the angel makes no appearance in the tale—he just gets the credit. Such conveniences are common in this kind of faith recounting, and Bingman folds them so seamlessly into his personal reflections that even the most secular readers should find them easy reading.
A thoroughly engaging account of a modern-day adventurer in the Alaskan backcountry—with spiritual elements mixed in.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973610-39-7
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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