Simultaneously uplifting, inspiring, and dispiriting.
An entertaining and informative trip around Alaska’s coastline, one man’s “event of a lifetime.”
Adventure writer and journalist Adams (Meet Me in Atlantis: My Quest to Find the Sunken City, 2015, etc.) returns to the successful narrative strategy he employed in his previous books, melding history and travel writing in a winning combination. Here, he follows in the footsteps of Edward H. Harriman’s 1899 expedition to northern Alaska. The Union Pacific tycoon refitted a steamship and invited a who’s who of “extraordinary gentlemen” to accompany him, including John Muir, John Burroughs, George Bird Grinnell, C. Hart Merriam, and a young photographer, Edward Curtis, “who had guided Merriam and Grinnell to safety after they’d gotten lost while hiking on Mount Rainier in 1898.” Adams journeyed alone, making his way to Bellingham, Washington, to board the Kennicott, setting out by sea, air, and land on Alaska’s 3,000-mile Marine Highway. The author is a terrific guide and an even better historian. Chapters juxtapose his and the 1899 expedition members’ experiences at each stop, from Anchorage and Haines to Nome and “Land’s End,” remote Shishmaref, located 30 miles south of the Arctic Circle on “a long sandbar, an elongated peanut two and a half miles long and less than a half mile wide at its narrow waist.” There, a resident told Adams that the “seasons have changed” and that “it’s taking longer for the ocean to freeze. Traditionally, it freezes in October. Last year it froze in January.” This environmental theme runs throughout the narrative. Alaska’s “frozen kingdom,” writes the author, is “dissolving like a popsicle in the sun.” In Gustavus (pop. 434), a golf course is “on land that had been underwater during the Harriman Expedition.” Because of “isostatic rebound,” the melting ice in Glacier Bay makes formerly depressed land rise up. Adams populates his story with hilarious tales and revealing encounters with guides, scientists, and a couple frisky brown bears.
Simultaneously uplifting, inspiring, and dispiriting.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98510-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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
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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