A by-the-numbers biography of a minor figure in the history of the American West. Nathan Boone (17811856) lived his life in the shadow of his father, Daniel. According to Hurt (Agricultural History and Rural Studies/Iowa State Univ.), that shadow was long, indeed, but Boone apparently did not hanker for fame. He battled Indians on the Missouri frontier, kept slaves, raised a few crops—lived, in short, a fairly ordinary life for his times. Accidents of history did find him at a few crossroads; he was of incidental help, for one thing, to Lewis and Clark as they made their way across the territory of the Osage Indians (for which service, Hurt is careful to note, he was paid $46.50), and he fought well in several engagements in the War of 1812 and the Black Hawk War. Later, Boone served as a career soldier, spending most of his service in Iowa and the Indian Territory. Hurt's recitation of the facts of Boone's life is efficient but dry; his deepest interests seem to lie in such matters as the economics of salt production and the effects of the Treaty of Ghent on US-Indian relations on the frontier, and he treats these matters carefully and with dispassion. Hurt doesn't make undue claims for the importance of his subject. But neither does he do much to make him especially interesting, and Nathan Boone remains little more than a hard-working soldier with a famous father, exhibiting the virtues and vices of his time. The result is a book of only modest interest to students of frontier and US military history. (20 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8262-1159-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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
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
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