A slow but informative read that is likely to appeal to history and art buffs.
A weighty, prodigiously researched biography of John James Audubon.
Logan makes his debut with an expansive account of the naturalist’s summer expedition to Labrador in 1833, an adventure that he believes hasn’t been fully covered by earlier biographers. Still, readers who haven’t previously studied this 19th-century artist/ornithologist aren’t dropped into the tale midstream. The author devotes more than a third of the narrative to Audubon’s early years, from his birth to an unwed mother in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1785, through his years of business failures in the American South, until his successful, herculean accomplishment: the publication of the first volumes of The Birds of America. He personally sold his costly prints by subscription, which were delivered as each volume was completed. In 1833, he still needed some final specimens in order to produce drawings and engravings to complete the four-volume masterpiece. At the time, he was facing production problems in England, subscribers who complained that they weren’t receiving prints in a timely fashion, and the effects of a stroke. Logan believes that the Labrador expedition afforded Audubon the opportunity to reclaim his physical stamina and rebuild his self-confidence. It also marked the dawn of Audubon’s awareness of man’s impact on the environment; he wrote: “When the fish are destroyed as according to present appearances they soon will be and the birds too, what will then be in Labrador. The destruction…is too wicked.” Logan uses copious primary and secondary source materials, including meticulously documented newspaper articles, personal letters, and journal entries written by Audubon and his legion of acquaintances, as well as hundreds of pages of endnotes—some referential, others featuring heavy annotations. He draws a vivid image of a charismatic personality who was, by turns, ebullient, melancholy, obsessed, and inquisitive. Overall, the book is scholarly in tone yet generally accessible. The text becomes a bit wearying at times, loaded as it is with biographical tidbits on just about everyone Audubon met. But the extensive descriptions of the naturalist’s slog through Labrador, the ordeals of ordinary travel, and the nature of 19th-century social networking illuminate the era. The book also includes maps as well as illustrations (not seen).
A slow but informative read that is likely to appeal to history and art buffs.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9972282-1-2
Page Count: 816
Publisher: Ashbryn Press
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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