A gripping tale and a sterling analysis of England’s first foray into the nastiest of human enterprises. (16 pp. b&w...
The swashbuckling, high-seas adventures of an English mariner who pioneered the enslavement of Africans, along the way enriching himself but earning history’s enduring censure.
Hazlewood (Savage: The Life and Times of Jemmy Button, 2001) crafts an engrossing, swift, and sanguinary narrative around Hawkyns, born circa 1532 into a wealthy Plymouth merchant family. He became a master sailor and a ferocious negotiator (cannon and sword were among his more persuasive tools), a man who sailed boldly into Spanish ports in the New World and forced the terrified denizens to trade (i.e., buy slaves) or suffer consequences that included burning homes, plundering local wealth, and killing temporizers. At the time Hawkyns’s sail first loomed on history’s horizon, Portugal and Spain enjoyed primacy in the slave trade between Africa and the Western Hemisphere, based on their arrangements with African leaders. Then the fearless Englishman arrived, using stealth and brutality to carve for his nation a profitable part of this market in humans. As Hazlewood points out, there was little objection anywhere to slavery on moral grounds. Queen Elizabeth, dancing delicately on history’s high wire, offered private support (she had other disturbing dishes on her plate: Mary, Queen of Scots; the powerful Spanish), and Hawkyns found willing investors. The author describes in great detail his first two very profitable ventures and the disastrous third one, during which he barely escaped with his life when the Spanish attacked him in Mexico. Hazlewood rightly points out, as well, the religious implications of all of this. Hawkyns’s Protestant men destroyed and desecrated Roman Catholic symbols and structures in the New World, and the Inquisitors later dealt harshly with some of the English they captured. The author also makes excellent use of some astonishing details, as when he describes English sailors fishing in a South American river for an alligator—and using one of their dogs as bait.
A gripping tale and a sterling analysis of England’s first foray into the nastiest of human enterprises. (16 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-621089-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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