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
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.
As much about Everywoman as one particular woman, French author Ernaux's autobiographical novel laconically describes the cruel realities of old age for a woman once vibrant and independent.
The narrator, a middle-aged writer, decides that the only way she can accept her mother's death is to begin "to write about my mother. She is the only woman who really meant something to me and she had been suffering from senile dementia for two years...I would also like to capture the real woman, the woman who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.'' And she proceeds to tell the story of this woman—who "preferred giving to everybody rather than taking from them,'' fiercely ambitious and anxious to better herself and her daughter—for whom she worked long hours in the small café and store the family owned. There are the inevitable differences and disputes as the daughter, better educated, rebels against the mother, but the mother makes "the greatest sacrifice of all, which was to part with me.'' The two women never entirely lose contact, however, as the daughter marries, the father dies, and both women move. Proud and self-sufficient, the mother lives alone, but then she has an accident, develops Alzheimer's, and must move to a hospital. A year after her death, the daughter, still mourning, observes, "I shall never hear the sound of her voice again—the last bond between me and the world I come from has been severed.'' Never sentimental and always restrained: a deeply affecting account of mothers and daughters, youth and age, and dreams and reality.
A love story, in other words, bittersweet like all the best.Pub Date: May 12, 1991
ISBN: 0-941423-51-4
Page Count: 112
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.
Full-immersion journalist Kidder (Home Town, 1999, etc.) tries valiantly to keep up with a front-line, muddy-and-bloody general in the war against infectious disease in Haiti and elsewhere.
The author occasionally confesses to weariness in this gripping account—and why not? Paul Farmer, who has an M.D. and a Ph.D. from Harvard, appears to be almost preternaturally intelligent, productive, energetic, and devoted to his causes. So trotting alongside him up Haitian hills, through international airports and Siberian prisons and Cuban clinics, may be beyond the capacity of a mere mortal. Kidder begins with a swift account of his first meeting with Farmer in Haiti while working on a story about American soldiers, then describes his initial visit to the doctor’s clinic, where the journalist felt he’d “encountered a miracle.” Employing guile, grit, grins, and gifts from generous donors (especially Boston contractor Tom White), Farmer has created an oasis in Haiti where TB and AIDS meet their Waterloos. The doctor has an astonishing rapport with his patients and often travels by foot for hours over difficult terrain to treat them in their dwellings (“houses” would be far too grand a word). Kidder pauses to fill in Farmer’s amazing biography: his childhood in an eccentric family sounds like something from The Mosquito Coast; a love affair with Roald Dahl’s daughter ended amicably; his marriage to a Haitian anthropologist produced a daughter whom he sees infrequently thanks to his frenetic schedule. While studying at Duke and Harvard, Kidder writes, Farmer became obsessed with public health issues; even before he’d finished his degrees he was spending much of his time in Haiti establishing the clinic that would give him both immense personal satisfaction and unsurpassed credibility in the medical worlds he hopes to influence.
Skilled and graceful exploration of the soul of an astonishing human being.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50616-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
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