A well-rendered travelogue and a profound excursion into what it means to remember and forget.
Tragedy stalks the periphery of an acclaimed travel writer’s eerily hypnotic journey deep into the heart of Colombia’s most mysterious river.
A few years ago, buoyed by a blessing from the great Gabriel García Márquez, the author decided to seek the source of the legendary Magdalena River in a tugboat. With Alzheimer’s already claiming his father's life and his mother's life now also nearing its end, the strangely languid tributary so closely tied to disappearance, loss and forgetting had come to represent an intensely personal pilgrimage that the author found he could simply not ignore. The result is a lushly written account of that ethereal experience. Throughout the journey, the potential for danger patiently laid in wait. The author provides both the complicated history of his parents and the nation of Colombia, and the hero of this often harrowing adventure was never quite convinced that the smart thing to do wasn't to just give up and abandon the quest. “The place filled me with an energy that magically dispersed the uncertainty of the past few days, together with that persistent sense of being on a journey towards some inescapable tragedy,” he writes. The Magdalena, it turns out, in addition to its lore of lost memories, is actually home to a hotbed of Alzheimer’s, and the author hoped investigating it would help him better understand the scourge that destroyed both his parents’ lives—and someday might also visit his as well. The river, with its own languid pace, was not about to give up its secrets so readily, however. This is a tortured part of the world with a tragically bloody history of political and economic strife involving guerrilla bands, paramilitary outfits and the army. Jacobs had to navigate through all of it in the hope that his memories would somehow endure.
A well-rendered travelogue and a profound excursion into what it means to remember and forget.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61902-196-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
Danielle's dirty linen. A lot of this unauthorized biography is about legal wrangling, much of it to do with child custody. It's a good story, but Steel could have told it better. Bane and Benet, People magazine staff reporters, follow up on their Steel exposÇ of 1992 (written with Paula Chin) with this book cobbled together from interviews, court depositions, and letters Steel wrote to her second husband, Danny Zugelder (most while he was in prison). Heaven knows Steel's life is more than the stuff of romance. She was a neglected child. When she was hospitalized with ovarian cancer at 16, her parents never visited her. She married two convicts: Zugelder, a car thief and bank robber, who was also jailed for assault and rape (they were married in a prison ceremony and consummated their relationship in a bathroom); and Bill Toth, a heroin addict imprisoned for fencing stolen goods. Toth and Steel fought over custody of their son, Nicholas, and much of the last half of the bio comes from trial depositions and interviews with Toth and his lawyers. Steel finally found her putative Prince Charming in John Traina, who the authors take pains to point out is not and has never been a shipping magnate, though he does have a dynamite collection of cigarette cases and closets full of designer clothes. With their nine children, Steel and Traina bought the enormous Spreckels mansion in San Francisco. They also own a mini- compound in the Napa Valley, where they house a fleet of cars and a staff of thousands. For the sins of success, eccentricity, and a strong sense of privacy, the authors try to build a case against Steel. But in the end she comes through as a hard worker and a gritty survivor. It's you-can-run-but-you-can't-hide journalism, gossipy with a sound foundation, and not too high on elegant turns of phrase. (First printing of 100,000; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-312-11257-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
Everything you always wanted to know about the ancient Egyptian practice of mummifying corpses—and so much more. Brier (Ancient Egyptian Magic, 1980) sets the tone early: ``For 15 years,'' he states matter-of-factly, ``I had been working toward the goal of mummifying a human.'' Imagine his surprise and disappointment when the C.W. Post campus of Long Island University (where he is chairman of the philosophy department) declined the honor of being the site of this project, which among other things would have entailed keeping an unembalmed corpse on the campus for 70 days. The text treats the reader to a scattershot review of the wide variety of information Brier learned about mummies while doing research for the mummification. These range from clinical descriptions of the process (derived from Herodotus and other ancient writers as well as from archaeological evidence) through an account of the development of mummification in ancient Egypt to a fascinating look at medical information scientists have derived from mummies (for instance, that ancient Egyptians suffered from often fatal tooth decay and arterial diseases). Brier discusses French scientists' close, but disappointingly unfruitful, study of Ramses the Great's mummy, briefly takes note of the Egyptian religious and cultural practice of mummifying animals, and inventories famous royal mummies. He concludes rather far afield with a discussion of ``The Mummy in Fiction and Film.'' Mercifully, the book closes before he embarks on the macabre task of actually mummifying a medical cadaver in the ancient manner, which is scheduled to take place this summer. A great gift idea for the hard-core Egyptologist in your life. General readers with strong stomachs may also enjoy Brier's eccentric ramble through the ancient world. (125 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1994
ISBN: 0-688-10272-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
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