A delightful story of a boy, his birds, and his pursuit of knowledge in spite of society’s dictates.
How catching and training a kestrel changed the life of a young British boy.
When Hines was 11, he failed his exams for grammar school. Unable to attend with his older brother, the author was sent to the secondary modern school, “where my education didn’t matter.” That was his first introduction to the English class system in the mid-1950s. Always a naturalist at heart, Hines soon was reading all he could find regarding falconry. It was near Tankersley Old Hall that he took his first kestrel, called Kes, and began training her. Now a true autodidact, his reading led him to T.H. White, T.E. Lawrence, and J.G. Mavrogordato, author of A Falcon in the Field. In hopes of visiting countries with a history of falconry—e.g., Sudan, India, and nations in the Middle East—Hines applied to join the Voluntary Service Overseas. The author was posted to Nigeria, where he was exposed to members of the fading British Empire and their racist, classist attitudes as well as native anger against their former rulers. Hines’ return to England, where he was to begin an environmental studies program, coincided with the making of a film based on his brother’s book about his kestrel training. The author trained three kestrels and served as falconer for the film, though his brother initially took all the credit. Throughout his memoir, Hines provides captivating descriptions and explanations of training the kestrels and how to “hack” them back to the wild, and the author’s love of his subject inevitably shows through. His discovery that the upper-class world of falconry wouldn’t have welcomed him once again exposed the social divisions of his country. His love of falconry and the environment influenced his life, and that obsession drove him to learn the history of his own class and become a television producer and director.
A delightful story of a boy, his birds, and his pursuit of knowledge in spite of society’s dictates.Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63286-502-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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