Nugent (The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck, 1991—not reviewed), a specialist in cryptozoological adventures—combing the far regions of the earth for undiscovered beasties—takes on Mokele-Mbembe, a brontosaurus-like dinosaur reported to dwell in the rain forests of central Africa. Most of Nugent's wry account consists of his misadventures in getting to Lake Tele in the Congo, purported home of Mokele-Mbembe. The clues are scarce: a few sightings by explorers; a questionable footprint; Pygmy tales of a rusty-skinned, long-necked creature with a single giant tooth. The natives, avid fetishists, revere Mokele-Mbembe as an immensely powerful spirit or god. A determined Nugent spends weeks in the broiling heat of Brazzaville, pleading with petty officials for a travel permit, even undergoing a naked exorcism to help his cause. Finally, the permit materializes and the author sets out for Lake Tele. Along the way, he collects gorgeous butterflies and hideous beetles, drinks crocodile brains, gets butted by a pangolin. And some illusions are shattered: He arrives at a remote village with trinkets for the natives only to find mowed lawns, clipped hedges, and stereos blasting heavy-metal music. But eventually the primeval jungle appears, and Nugent gets lost in it, encountering Pygmies who threaten him with bows and arrows. At last, he spots from about a kilometer away an ``elongated black form that curves in on itself,'' but when he dashes in for a closer look, his guides restrain him at gunpoint, explaining that ``The god can approach man, but man NEVER can approach the god. He would have killed us all.'' Much wittier than most cryptozoological reports (which veer toward stuffiness to counterbalance the jeers)—and a spanking good travelogue to boot. (Photos—not seen)
Pub Date: June 28, 1993
ISBN: 0-395-58707-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
This exhaustive new biography, coming on the centennial of Earhart's birth, throws new light on many of the more controversial elements of the aviator's life and death. Earhart was a self-possessed and downright adventurous young woman. Her two enduring passions were flying and social work, endeavors that both seem to have captivated the feminine imagination in her time. By the time she was 25, Earhart ``had become one of those early mythical heroes of the sky whom people came to see at air meets and dreamed of emulating.'' She ``vagabonded'' across the country solo in a plane and, with the help of her husband, publishing giant George Putnam, had the book documenting her tale out on the stands less than two weeks after completion of the feat. The list of her flight achievements is lengthy and impressive. But it is the cool yet inspired marriage between Putnam and Earhart, two inveterate adventurers, that lies at the core of Butler's biography. Putnam was a brilliant media spin-doctor who relentlessly promoted his wife's image. Butler's study raises some provocative questions (Was Earhart a feminist or just a singular human being? Were her feats victories for women everywhere or victories for pure heroism?) without convincingly answering them. But if the study isn't always persuasive in its answers, it is filled with wonderful details about Earhart's glamorous lifestyle and the wild, dangerous world of early aviators. Earhart disappeared at sea in 1938, trying to be the first pilot to circumnavigate the earth at its widest point, before turning 40. Even the manner of her death contrived to sustain America's fascination with her. Butler's flat writing style somewhat undermines her portrait of Earhart's singular emotional and physical courage. Nonetheless, the still enthralling figure of the aviator—wearing her signature trousers and jacket, blond hair and silk scarf blowing, beckoning to the free spirit in all of us—does powerfully come through. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-201-31144-5
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Piazza, whose short-story collection Blues and Trouble (1996) won the Michener Prize, looks again at his favorite music in this collection of occasional pieces. Writing on jazz between 1979 and 1997 (for which he won the 1996 ASCAPDeems Taylor Award for Music Writing), Piazza has had the opportunity to watch this musical phoenix arise once again resplendent from its supposed ashes. In the course of the two decades covered by the pieces in this volume (most of them previously published in the New York Times, the New Republic, Atlantic Monthly, and the Village Voice), Piazza has recounted the arrival of a new generation of young jazz musicians, headed by the controversial Wynton Marsalis. The author has been one of the more forceful advocates for Marsalis and his acolytes and their brand of neoclassical jazz. Briefly, Piazza believes that the critics who decry Marsalis's lack of ``emotion'' are unwittingly and tacitly racist, reducing all jazz to a sort of primitive expression of raw feeling and undervaluing the role of intellect in the creation of the music. It's an argument that's not without some merit, as his lengthy attacks on James Lincoln Collier (particularly a scathing review of Collier's egregious Duke Ellington biography) show. But too many of the pieces here—the opening reviews of McCoy Tyner and Mary Lou Williams in particular—have little or nothing to do with this thesis. The best essays are reportage from the road, a previously unpublished piece on a jazz festival in Dahomey and a recounting of days and nights on tour with Wynton and his band. Piazza is a writer worth paying attention to, but this book is too slight a framework to support his arguments. In fact, it is too slight a framework to call a book.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-16789-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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