An engrossing, delightful descent into a life of books.
Colt (Defend The Valley, 1994) tells the story of a Manhattan-based mom-and-pop military bookstore in this memoir.
In September 1975, after Harris Colt learned that his small brokerage firm was shuttering, he said to his wife, Margaretta, “It’s time for the bookstore.” Although she had no idea what he was talking about, she was soon helping her husband realize his lifelong dream: to open a rare and out-of-print bookshop specializing in military history. Despite the risks of renting a storefront in Manhattan, including its proximity to dangerous neighborhoods and the fact that American interest in anything military was at a low ebb, the Military Bookman opened shop at 170 E. 92nd St. the next summer. This is Margaretta’s account of a quarter-century of selling books; of becoming an expert in the many histories, accounts, manuals, memoirs, and ephemera that make up the military market; and of learning to wrangle the obsessive collectors who seek them out. It chronicles the shifting landscape of Manhattan in the last decades of the 20th century and the changing tastes of the American public regarding warfare (always reflective of the politics of the time). Most of all, it’s the story of a couple who dedicated their lives and livelihoods to a small, peculiar field and the community that arose to embrace them. Colt is a surprisingly urgent and elegant writer, particularly when she gets into the minutiae of her merchandise: “One of my favorites was an anomaly, the rare depiction of Napoleonic battles by a Chinese artist, with a godlike view above the fray, almost aerial perspectives of tiny, ignorant armies on a not-too-darkling plain.” Expect no high human drama, though: although the characters are colorful, the books themselves are the focus of this memoir. For some, that may prove uninteresting after 50 pages, but never mind those people: this is a read for the reading-obsessed, for those who truly love the physicality, variety, and dynamism of the printed medium and for whom a day in the musty stacks of a darkened shop sounds like something close to paradise.
An engrossing, delightful descent into a life of books.Pub Date: June 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5088-4944-5
Page Count: 346
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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 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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