Yep, there’s gold in them thar hills—but lots of dross as well. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Freelance travel-writer Petro journeys through Appalachia and the Deep South to visit storytellers and record their tales, with uneven results.
The author divides her text into four “journeys,” automobile trips she took from her Rhode Island home into the South, “a famously talky place.” Between jaunts, she returns to New England for brief sojourns to do laundry and think. “First Journey” begins, appropriately enough, at the home of Joel Chandler Harris in Atlanta, where she hears a storyteller named Akbar Imhotep relate the tale of Brer Rabbit and the tar baby. Then it’s off to Florida (she sees the memorial to Rosewood, a black town razed by whites in 1922), then back to Georgia, where she meets Vickie Vedder, a storyteller who remains a presence principally through e-mails, several of which Petro reproduces at eye-glazing length. When not repeating stories, the writer expatiates on tornado warnings, kudzu, race, snake-handling (she includes a fabulously eerie story about rattlesnakes), motels, chigger bites, Gullah, and ghosts. A few tales appear without interruption, but others are paraphrased, interrupted, modified, or otherwise adumbrated by Petro. Some moments dazzle. She talks with a black woman for three hours before discovering the woman is blind; she tells the bizarre (and implausible) story of a woman born with a blackberry birthmark that darkens each year as the fruit ripens. Most dazzling of all is the intrepid author. She drives deep into the woods, visits the homes of the odd and the eerie, engages anyone and everyone in conversation about stories and storytelling, endeavors to elicit from the reluctant some words of wisdom. Alas, not all stories are created equal, and weirdness alone seldom suffices. More than a few of the tales are lifeless (they beg to be heard, not read), and some of Petro’s epiphanies never advance beyond banal.
Yep, there’s gold in them thar hills—but lots of dross as well. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-612-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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