The links among these diverse personalities are barely discernible, but Breton’s enthusiasm is contagious: his heroes and...
Veteran Canadian author Berton portrays five intrepid folk enthralled by the call of the Arctic.
Himself a native son of the Yukon Territory, the author begins with Joe Boyle, a speculator at the time of the Gold Rush. While others staked small individual claims, Boyle got the timber and water rights to an eight-mile swathe of land; with these he was able to create a hydroelectric plant to power the monstrously huge dredges that made him, for a time, fabulously wealthy. In a stranger-than-fiction twist, he later swashbuckled across revolution-torn Russia and landed in Romania, where the “King of the Klondike” became an intimate of real royalty, that country’s Queen Marie. The second essay concerns Vilhjalmur Steffansson, “the last of the old-time Arctic explorers,” who made monumental northern peregrinations before tarnishing his reputation by claiming to have discovered “Blond Eskimos.” Then comes Lady Jane Franklin, who campaigned tirelessly to have her husband, Sir John Franklin, declared the discoverer of the Northwest Passage—daunted not in the least by lack of evidence for this claim. Next onstage is John Hornby, a fanatical loner who drifted about above the treeline on Canada’s inhospitable Barren Ground; his pathological refusal to plan ahead resulted in the deaths from starvation of himself, a companion, and his 17-year-old second cousin. Finally, Berton presents Robert Service, the Kiplingesque bard of the north who immortalized the rough life in “The Shooting of Dan McGrew.” Of his most famous work, Service said simply, “I loathe it. I was sick of it the moment I finished writing it.”
The links among these diverse personalities are barely discernible, but Breton’s enthusiasm is contagious: his heroes and lunatics make for fascinating reading.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2005
ISBN: 0-7867-1507-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2004
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
