A worthy addition to Colorado literature.
Amiable, bookish wanderings along paths blazed by a genteel lady in the Rockies more than a century ago.
Root, a retired professor from Michigan, tracks the English travel writer Isabella Bird, whose A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains was published in 1879. Recounting a season’s exploration of the mining towns and byways above modern Denver, Bird’s book did not, as Root quietly notes, really describe “a life”—and other women had written about the region before Bird got there. But she hit the zeitgeist, and, as one later editor observed, gave early voice to the preservationist impulse that would lead to the protection of Estes Park and other places. Root writes more prosaically than Bird, who was given to bursts of Victorian purplishness, but he has a well-honed appreciation for such things as how the sky of the Great Plains meets the towering mountains. While admitting to a touch of acrophobia, he has no fear of traveling vertiginous mountain roads “strewn with fallen rocks the size and shape of urban telephone books” in pursuit of just the right all-commanding overlook. “I concede to her the prize for pluck and perseverance, for resolve and resilience,” he writes. “By comparison, I’m rather wussy and don’t intend to be otherwise.” Perhaps so, but Root is no slouch. It’s true that Bird traveled by horseback and Root by compact car and other motorized vehicles, but they share qualities and concerns, finding plenty of untraveled stretches of all-too-busy Colorado to write about and marveling at them. Root also does a nice job of bringing Bird to life by reminding readers of her relationship with a wily mountain man who appeared to her in a faraway vision on the night he was shot to death—“a quirky story,” he notes, that reminds us that Bird was “complex and problematic.”
A worthy addition to Colorado literature.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8061-4018-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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