A sorry, if Herculean, chapter in Australian history, albeit venal and murderously inept, told by Murgatroyd with verve and...
A shimmering reconstruction of the 1860 Victorian Exploring Expedition, which sought to traverse Australia south to north and needed no clairvoyance to predict its end in disaster.
The age of exploration was ending, but there remained great swaths of land outside the ken of Europeans, and one of these was interior Australia. The Royal Society deemed it time to finance an expedition through the uncharted landscape. Journalist Murgatroyd, however, notes that the expedition, while allowing for feints toward the heroism of exploration and the desire for scientific knowledge, may have been motivated primarily by economic considerations: control of the future telegraph cable and the possibility of overland trade with Southeast Asia. The leader of the expedition, Robert Burke, was a bit of a loose cannon with a reputation for spending “hours lying in his outdoor bathtub, wearing nothing but his police helmet, reading a book, and cursing the mosquitoes.” Without any background in exploration, little regard for the scientists among his company, less for the aborigines he met en route (“he had come to conquer, not to learn”), and an overburden of fruitless supplies—he had packed a goodly supply of dandruff brushes—Burke made numerous logistical blunders in his drive to secure his patron’s wishes, ultimately finding himself with three men pushing his way to the north coast, amid “a continuous mass of mangroves, mosquitoes, mud, and mosquitoes.” He made it, but he wouldn’t make it back, nor would many of his men. Little of practical nature was made of his discoveries, yet he is remembered in Australia as a hero. By Murgatroyd’s lights, he was lucky to make it as far as he did before, inevitably, his luck wore out.
A sorry, if Herculean, chapter in Australian history, albeit venal and murderously inept, told by Murgatroyd with verve and a gathering sense of doom. (Photographs and maps)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-0828-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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