There is no lack of fascinating anecdotes, but mostly this is a dense catalog that will primarily interest paleontology...
From a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, an exhaustive biography of an adventurous bone hunter, a leading figure in the heroic age of American paleontology.
Son of an Illinois farmer and fascinated by fossils, John Bell Hatcher (1861-1904) worked his way through Yale and impressed superiors who sent him west to where rich, new fossil beds had produced a rush of professional diggers and amateur fortune hunters. He quickly proved his value, finding and shipping east tons of precious fossils and fossil-bearing material but also showing a precision and delicacy in dealing with the specimens—which, despite being rock, are delicate—that became the accepted technique. For 20 years, he was in great demand, producing a steady stream of discoveries from digs in the United States and Patagonia despite working under often miserable conditions. Promoted to curator of paleontology at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh in 1900, Hatcher, who had health problems throughout his life, died suddenly at age 42. Hatcher’s prolific correspondence to his employers has been largely preserved, and his discoveries sit in museums across the world. This is ample raw material for an engaging biography, but Dingus (Hell Creek, Montana: America's Key to the Prehistoric Past, 2004, etc.) mostly draws on it to deliver an extremely detailed, chronological record of Hatcher’s travels, travails, and discoveries, a relentless series of itineraries, equipment inventories, expenses, business quarrels, descriptions of bones discovered, their species, and ultimate destination, often including their museum catalog number in case readers want to look them up. The author also includes a 14-page glossary of genera.
There is no lack of fascinating anecdotes, but mostly this is a dense catalog that will primarily interest paleontology buffs. Readers searching for a history of the stormy late-19th-century dinosaur discoveries should try The Bonehunters’ Revenge (1999) by David Rains Wallace.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-865-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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