A definitive guide and then some to what seems to be every mile of the more than 5,000 traveled by Blocksma (Naming Nature, not reviewed) along the US side of the Great Lakes. The author's comprehensive narration of her three-month solo expedition is not in the least restricted to one unifying theme. Camping enthusiasts will discover which state parks have open sites and which are wooded (mosquitoes are ubiquitous at all of them); geology buffs can read about sand dunes, rip currents, glaciers, and the five types of wetlands; the reader learns that the lakes saw some 50 shipwrecks a day in the late 19th century and that Sandusky, Ohio, once had the largest roller coaster in the Midwest. The indefatigably curious Blocksma tours a sewage treatment plant on Lake Erie and a nuclear power facility on Lake Michigan; is warned away by guards at the gate of an exclusive resort in Harbor Springs, Mich.; visits the birthplace of the dune buggy; and parasails over Grand Traverse Bay. At a lunch counter near Green Bay, Wis., she discovers that more than 12,000 people are on the Packers season-ticket waiting list. At times, Blocksma's encyclopedic prose threatens to overwhelm the casual reader. She is fond of nautical measurements and a compulsive maker of lists, noting everything from fish species to park fees. Yet there is something agreeable about her wide-eyed excitement over this abundance of minutiae and arcane detail; her attention to statistics and description at times echoes John McPhee. Even more praiseworthy is her tenacity, as she camps alone and interviews a dizzying number of park rangers, fishermen, sailors, historians, nuclear-plant workers, hoteliers, and seemingly anyone else within reach—though some of the conversations are amazingly mundane. Blocksma contributes mightily to our understanding of a vital section of the continent.
Pub Date: March 14, 1995
ISBN: 0-14-017881-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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