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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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