Well conceived but imperfectly executed, Cooper’s narrative suffers from the inevitable comparison to Twain’s own—but he is...
A serviceable travelogue of a circumnavigation in search of Samuel Clemens.
In the summer of 1895, desperately ill and nearly bankrupt after his publishing company failed, the 60-year-old writer Samuel Clemens, alias Mark Twain, decided to fall back on his storytelling skills and make a fortune anew by traveling around the world giving public readings. The lecture circuit was extremely lucrative in the 19th century, and Twain no doubt had the examples of Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde (who both reaped small fortunes off their reading tours) in mind. In the end, although it took a further toll on his health, it was a shrewd decision: not only did Twain gather material for several books and hundreds of newspaper articles while barnstorming across the South Pacific, Australia, India, and South Africa, but he also cemented his reputation as an international celebrity. An American journalist living in Jerusalem, Cooper had the happy notion of retracing Twain’s footsteps, an idea that suffers somewhat in the execution only because Twain’s accounts, often outrageously tongue in cheek, are so much livelier and better written than Cooper’s. The latter has an unfortunate habit of casting his narrative in the present tense—“We gaze at a log with the bones of victims stuffed into the crevices,” or “We return to the car and continue slowly along the secluded track”—and employing mawkish mood-setting devices better suited to a television travel documentary than to a prose work. In the main, however, he is a reliable and sympathetic narrator whose journey, although unremarkable on its own, provides a vehicle for uncovering lesser-known aspects of Twain’s life and work. If nothing else, readers may be inspired after reading Cooper to turn to Twain’s own writings on his voyage, especially Following the Equator, with its sharp observations on the world of a century ago.
Well conceived but imperfectly executed, Cooper’s narrative suffers from the inevitable comparison to Twain’s own—but he is well worth the cost of his passage all the same.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55970-522-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he...
The latest from French writer/filmmaker Carrère (My Life as a Russian Novel, 2010, etc.) is an awkward but intermittently touching hybrid of novel and autobiography.
The book begins in Sri Lanka with the tsunami of 2004—a horror the author saw firsthand, and the aftermath of which he describes powerfully. Carrère and his partner, Hélène, then return to Paris—and do so with a mutual devotion that's been renewed and deepened by all they've witnessed. Back in France, Hélène's sister Juliette, a magistrate and mother of three small daughters, has suffered a recurrence of the cancer that crippled her in adolescence. After her death, Carrère decides to write an oblique tribute and an investigation into the ravages of grief. He focuses first on Juliette's colleague and intimate friend Étienne, himself an amputee and survivor of childhood cancer, and a man in whose talkativeness and strength Carrère sees parallels to himself ("He liked to talk about himself. It's my way, he said, of talking to and about others, and he remarked astutely that it was my way, too”). Étienne is a perceptive, dignified person and a loyal, loving friend, and Carrère's portrait of him—including an unexpectedly fascinating foray into Étienne and Juliette's chief professional accomplishment, which was to tap the new European courts for help in overturning longtime French precedents that advantaged credit-card companies over small borrowers—is impressive. Less successful is Carrère's account of Juliette's widower, Patrice, an unworldly cartoonist whom he admires for his fortitude but seems to consider something of a simpleton. Now and again, especially in the Étienne sections, Carrère's meditations pay off in fresh, pungent insights, and his account of Juliette's last days and of the aftermath (especially for her daughters) is quietly harrowing.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9261-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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