The longtime Canadian collaborators (Sahara, 2002, etc.) outline the natural and chronological history of a 30-mile crescent of peach-colored sand that still eats an occasional ship for supper.
Dotted with greenery and wild horses, orchids and Ipswich sparrows, Sable Island is considered one of the great graveyards of the North Atlantic. It sits out there in the ocean’s steel-gray roil on the edge of the continental shelf. Who would ever suspect that there would be a shape-shifting island in this vastness, with submerged bars ready to trap and topple a ship? Very few, at least at first, explain the authors in their glinting profile. The island’s distant past is as foggy as its summer weather; Basque sailors may have been there, maybe Vikings, perhaps an Irish monk in a coracle. De Villiers and Hirtle provide a sweet little geological history of the place, a child of glacial retreat, and detail the island’s special location “in the center of this vortex, this complex system of currents, gyres, and rings” that give it stability but also may spell its doom by pushing it into the abyssal gully to the east. For such a small scrap of sand, the island has a dogged human history, borne of the rivalry between the French and English. A humane establishment was founded there to aid shipwrecked sailors (brought to life with excerpts from letters, diaries, and news reports) as well as to dump a lunatic or misfit or two. Access is guarded these days to protect the fragile estate and its inhabitants—seals that serve as fodder for the elusive Greenland shark, birds, and feral ponies—but the island remains under threat from energy interests and from nature itself.
Another finely etched portrait of a strange, romantic place from this accomplished duo. (15 b&w photographs, 3 maps, not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8027-1432-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | NATURE | WORLD | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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