With the light, revealing touch of a master reporter, Fradkin (Wanderings of an Environmental Journalist, 1993, etc.) takes the Golden State's measure, top to bottom. For the author, California is seven states rolled into one, with landscape playing the defining role: Deserts (southeast), Sierra (east), Land of Fire (northwest), Land of Water (north coast), the Great Valley (central interior), the Fractured Province (central coast), and the Profligate Province (south coast). Each of these substates draws its internal cohesiveness not only from geography but also from economics, customs, heritage, and culture. In each region Fradkin has discovered some powerful landscape element, a particularly distinctive node of pyschogeographical intensity, such as the deserts' dry lakes, with their intaglios and bombing ranges; the sierra passes that tested every westward-bound emigrant's mettle; the divisive, despoiling role of timber in the Land of Water. Each of these features serves as a lodestone for chunks of history (Fradkin judiciously employs fragments of period diaries to give the narrative pungency) and for his own detailed, filigreed observations. The text is salted with shrewd minibiographies, of everyone from William Mulholland (the man who brought water to LA and trouble to Jack Nicholson in Chinatown) and Harry Chandler (owner of the Los Angeles Times) to survivors of the infamous Donner Party and the fishermen of Humboldt Bay. Bitingly ever-present is the explosive racial hatred that has marked California's history since Europeans moved in: Tensions between whites and Native Americans, Chinese, African-Americans, Japanese, East Indians, Mexicans, and Filipinos have roiled and boiled through the centuries. California might be ``beguiling and lyrically beautiful,'' but it is also suspect terrain: chaotic and unstable, a violent medley, a land of extremes. Fascinating, intimate, and readable in the extreme. (30 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 24, 1995
ISBN: 0-8050-1947-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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