A middling account for those with an unquenchable jones for yarns of lost codices, Nicholas Cage movies, Edgar Cayce...
A companion volume to the DIY treasure-hunting History Channel series.
Is there anyone who doesn’t like a good yarn of hidden treasure and long-lost gold? No, and that’s why Robert Louis Stephenson remains so popular today. Unfortunately, this book is no Treasure Island but instead a sometimes-tedious, overly detailed account of the many treasure-hunting expeditions to a woody Canadian island and the theories about the treasure hidden underground. Former Rolling Stone contributing editor and true-crime specialist Sullivan (Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson, 2012, etc.) explores a tale focusing on the efforts of brothers Marty and Rick Lagina to wrest the secrets of a scrubby, tiny spot of land off the Nova Scotia coast. And what might they find? Red herrings, maybe, including “a giant insulating sponge spread out for a length of 145 feet along the shoreline between the high and low tide marks.” Also, deep pits, tunnels, and hidden chambers, to say nothing of “five large granite stones that were spread in different directions in the vicinity of…Joudrey’s Cove.” What else? Well, Oak Island could hide Spanish doubloons from ships blown off course by Caribbean hurricanes or maybe some of Captain Kidd’s ill-gotten loot. Then there are more Dan Brown–esque possibilities, all of which the Lagina brothers merrily entertain on their show and Sullivan dutifully rehearses: the Holy Grail and Ark of the Covenant, for example, spirited away from their lairs in Cathar France to Scotland “and then, of course, to Oak Island.” Maybe there is something planted by the Knights Templar or a secret left behind by Francis Bacon, the English scientist and all-around oddball, “a theory tethered—at some points, at least—to historical evidence,” as Sullivan credulously but unconvincingly writes.
A middling account for those with an unquenchable jones for yarns of lost codices, Nicholas Cage movies, Edgar Cayce prophecies, and the like.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2693-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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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