A masterly re-creation of an ultimately ruinous journey.
Bravery and boldness are defeated by ignorance and the elements in a fictional treatment of Sir John Franklin’s doomed search for the Northwest Passage in 1845.
To Franklin’s mostly young crew of 135, as they set out from Greenland on the ships Erebus and Terror, it must have seemed scientific and perfectly possible to make the first northern passage of the American continent. The party had with them three years’ worth of canned provisions, and they were equipped to photograph their findings. The two ships carried auxiliary steam engines, and the expedition’s leaders had both Arctic and Antarctic experience. But what a daunting schedule, by necessity, they had set for themselves. Given the brevity of polar summers and the depth of the ice pack, they set out knowing they would have to spend at least two very long winters frozen fast in the Arctic Ocean. What they did not and perhaps could not foresee after a successful first wintering was the possibility of sailing at the end of the second summer into a harbor that had opened only on a fluke, a once-in-years thawing that, after it had refrozen, kept Erebus and Terror permanently icebound and unable to continue. Compounding the misery: corrupt canned goods leading to rampant scurvy and maybe poisoning. Edric’s thoroughly capable and evenhanded treatment in this reconstruction of the unknowable moves relentlessly and fairly quickly through what must have been agonizingly long periods of inaction, concentrating wisely on the younger, lesser-known members of the team, leaving the leaders to their encyclopedia entries. Most importantly, British author Edric, whose first US appearance this is, makes clear the Victorian sanity and scientific attitude that are too often written off as victims of the mania for exploration.
A masterly re-creation of an ultimately ruinous journey.Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28889-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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