All in all, a well-paced, nuanced contribution to the history of exploration.
A richly detailed life of perhaps the greatest maritime explorer in history.
A partial life, that is: Thomas (Anthropology/Univ. of London; Colonialism’s Culture, not reviewed) shuns the “grandfather to grave” course of most biographies, beginning his study of the Yorkshire-born James Cook as he neared 40. By 1767, Cook was already an accomplished sailor and leader, driven by a keen desire to put points and lines on maps where none had existed before. As a surveyor, Thomas shows, Cook was nearly without peer, and his sea and coastal charts “produced a new kind of accurate knowledge that suddenly showed up his predecessors’ efforts for their amateurishness.” As Cook voyaged ever farther from England, now aboard the Endeavour, he added ethnographic skills to his quiver, thanks in some measure to the influence of his shipmate Joseph Banks; Thomas considers both to have been “embodiments of Enlightenment inquiry,” and both took care to record cultural, geographical, and natural-historical details in their journals and logs, even if they sometimes failed to record incidents that did not reflect well on the captain. We can only guess at those incidents, but some must have involved the deaths of native peoples. Though Cook had taken an interest in and even praised the lifeways of some of the indigenous peoples he encountered, he apparently had no qualms about raising his pistol; as Thomas notes, commenting on an account by a contemporary writer, “Cook’s excuse was, in effect, that you had to be there to see why this occurred . . . which was to beg the questions of whether civilized men were only civilized in civilized places, and whether their travels took them into situations beyond the scope of ethical and moral principles that were surely supposed to apply universally.” Thomas does well to sound that heart-of-darkness theme, which turns up at points throughout his narrative as Cook becomes ever gloomier about the enterprise of command and ever quicker to assert European, and his own, authority—behavior that surely contributed to his death at the hands of unimpressed Hawaiians in 1779.
All in all, a well-paced, nuanced contribution to the history of exploration.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8027-1412-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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