bookshelf

SURVIVE

Name: SURVIVE
Author: Nate Hardcastle
ISBN: 1-56025-367-3

STORIES OF CASTAWAYS AND CANNIBALS

edited by Nate Hardcastle ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

Rattling stories that repel and attract the reader like natural forces, dreadful and irresistible.

bookshelf

A discomforting collection of stories of people in extremely straitened circumstances, stranded and often with nothing to eat but their deceased comrades, assembled by Hardcastle (Deep Blue, not reviewed).

Among these 16 stories are a few fiction pieces, little excerpted gems from Twain, Defoe, Melville, and Jack London, of cannibals and shipwreck. They serve to lighten the otherwise dreadful load borne by the other works, nonfiction accounts of surviving horrible ordeals, some more, some less convincing, but all enthralling in their misery. There is material here from Virginia Reed Murphy on her experiences with the Donner Party, though she skirts the cannibalism issue, and Tobias Schneebaum recounts an episode in the Peruvian wild in which he partakes of a piece of a rival warrior's heart, heavily charged with Schneebaum's sexual imagery and not the more persuasive for it. Leonard Clark also went to the Peruvian Amazon, back in the 1940s in search of El Dorado, and wound up barely escaping from a group of ecstatic fighters, lost in a world of sorcery that Clark describes fabulously, although other members of his party were not so fortunate to tell of it. The tales of being lost at sea are the most finely crafted and the most disturbing. Steven Callahan was adrift for 76 days, and even in this excerpt, he manages to catch the cadence of his days, struggling to catch fish and collect water and keep his mind from unhinging. The story that leaves the most terrible impression is Louise Longo's. Sailing with her husband and five-year-old daughter, their boat sunk. First her husband died, then a freighter came along but wasn’t able to get her and her daughter aboard, then, the seawater lapping on the lifeboat's floor, her daughter died, “all at once, before I had time to see death arrive.”

Rattling stories that repel and attract the reader like natural forces, dreadful and irresistible.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 1-56025-367-3

Page Count: 360

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

bookshelf

NUTCRACKER

by E.T.A. Hoffmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 28, 1996

bookshelf

This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)

Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996

ISBN: 0-15-100227-4

Page Count: 136

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER AND THE MOUSE KING
by E.T.A. Hoffmann ; adapted by Natalie Andrewson ; illustrated by Natalie Andrewson

- BOOK REVIEW
THE NUTCRACKER
by E.T.A. Hoffmann & illustrated by Julie Paschkis

bookshelf

TO THE ONE I LOVE THE BEST

EPISODES FROM THE LIFE OF LADY MENDL (ELSIE DE WOLFE)

by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955

bookshelf

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.