A majestic, frozen backdrop beautifully thawed by human life.
Inspiring stories of an upbringing in the frosty wilderness.
Employing a pleasant, conversational tone, novelist and outdoor photographer Kantner (Ordinary Wolves, 2004) fondly relates his life in Alaska. His prideful father Howard, an intrepid wanderer, scaled Mount McKinley in the early 1960s. Howard had previously learned the ancient ways of the indigenous Iñupiaq people, which he and wife Erna then translated into the upbringing of Seth and his brother Kole. Kantner testifies to the immense challenges of day-to-day survival in a homemade sod igloo, a structure that was regularly buried by sudden snow squalls, in a climate where “frostbite was a way of life.” The Kantner family subsisted on animals like porcupine and caribou in its entirety: “pot roast, tongue, tenderloins, lips and leg bones, rendered back and intestine fat.” They wore mukluks and wrapped themselves in hides to stay warm as they drank melted snow and welcomed stray visitors to their free-range “bush life.” Throughout their youth, Seth and Kole experienced “low stone walls of racism” from nearby Eskimo villagers because of their white skin. As they matured into young men, the brothers hunted, ice-fished and trapped otter together, though the gap between their personal interests eventually pried them apart. Kole went on to study physics; Seth romanced his wife-to-be in their igloo, quit college, then later gravitated to the exacting art of nature photographs, many of which fill this book with breathtaking splendor. Later chapters find the author and spouse Stacey enjoying adventures on the Alaskan tundra, including varied moose dramas and driving daughter China to kindergarten in 30-degree-below-zero weather. Now in his late 40s, the author advocates for the preservation of the Alaskan tundra, increasingly gentrified by big-fisted politics and “heaped and flippant wealth.”
A majestic, frozen backdrop beautifully thawed by human life.Pub Date: June 2, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-57131-301-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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