Rattling stories that repel and attract the reader like natural forces, dreadful and irresistible.
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
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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
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