A portrait of a Colorado valley and, more to the point, of its wealthy owners. Novelist Evans (Bluefeather Fellini in the Sacred Realm, 1994) joins a tradition of western writers—John Culley, Robert Glass Cleland, Joseph Wood Krutch, Tom Lea, even Wallace Stegner—who have penned rah-rah biographies of prominent regional business people. In this case, the entrepreneur in question is Charles Leavell, a Texan who made his fortune selling to the federal government various implements of the Cold War, including nuclear reactors scattered across the countryside, from Connecticut to California. With the proceeds, he bought a big chunk of southwestern Colorado, an area of ``lush, fertile soil surrounded on three sides by massive mountains'' that had once been home to innumerable Ute Indians and smallholder farmers. No more, of course, but no matter; in Evans's eyes, ``the 4UR [ranch] aura moves on in the best of caring hands,'' outsiders' hands though they may be (and by many Coloradans' lights, Texans are the ultimate outsiders). Evans's tone is celebratory throughout, in the manner of a college yearbook: ``Charles has made an art form of fun, absorbing great joy from art and business, trout fishing and grand outdoor and indoor feasts, or just having a quiet visit with a close friend.'' His narrative, too, often bogs down in insignificant episodes that doubtless mean much to the Leavell family but fail to inspire the reader—for instance, a glancing account of a visit by the famed cook and author Julia Child, who gorged herself on fried chicken and hamburgers while taking in local fly-fishing spots. It would have been more significant to point out that, like so many other once-working ranches in the Southwest, the 4UR is now a tourist destination, appealing to deep-pocketed visitors from afar. Little bits and pieces of southwestern history, regional and local, keep this account from degenerating into a mere family scrapbook—but only by a hair.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-87081-437-0
Page Count: 269
Publisher: Univ. Press of Colorado
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
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. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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