Call it dull on ice.
A grinding memoir of life in the Alaskan wild.
Joining forces with practiced as-told-to author Sasser, Cobb relates her adventures as Alaska’s last homesteader (that is, the recipient of free government land in exchange for a guarantee to settle on and improve it). Her adventures are various, sometimes terrifying, and unfailingly predictable. Most readers already have an idea that Alaska is a wild, cold, beautiful place full of bears and other dangerous critters, and reading Cobb’s book will add little to that store of information: it’s full of pesky bears, all right, who steal the homesteaders’ food and poop all over their belongings, and it’s also full of majestic mountains and towering trees. That much said, the author treats us to sentimental nothings such as this: “In his eyes already appeared the faraway Alaska look. Wolves and grizzlies had that look. Les said it came from gazing into free and wild places where a man could be a man.” The narrative picks up force here and there when Cobb and company get down to describing in detail how men act like men in the frozen North (i.e., often badly and often ineptly). In one memorable scene, Cobb’s husband, who turns out to be a risky and moody partner, faces down a psychopathic bully of a neighbor Old West–style, ready to draw a pistol and square things up; in another, he courts a jail sentence by selling unlicensed booze to oil-camp workers; in still another, he disappears without a word, leaving his family to fend for itself. Still, everything turns out all right for the Cobbs in the end, after Norma finds fulfillment in sled-dog mushing and home-schooling and her husband discovers gold, mercifully bringing this tale to its close.
Call it dull on ice.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26198-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
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
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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