Occasionally heavy handed, but offers a unique perspective on the intersection of man and wild.
The wolfman reveals his human side.
Living with the Wolfman star Ellis teams with veteran ghostwriter Junor (My Life, My Way, 2009, etc.) to share his life story. Born in a remote village on England’s northeastern coast, Ellis lived most of his youth with his farming grandparents, from whom he learned essential values about order in the animal kingdom. Two early deaths proved formative to Ellis’s ethic that more civilized behavior is often found in the forest: that of the central figure in his life, his grandfather, when the author was 13, and the trapping of a fox kit he had studied for months. “Looking back,” writes the author, “there is no doubt that the shock of seeing that magnificent young fox—my friend—hanging from that tree left me with a feeling of revulsion for my own kind and a desire to distance myself from the human race.” This tension of being caught between worlds permeates much of the book, which centers on the many empirical conclusions about wolf behavior that he drew from months of living with them in the wilds of Idaho, Poland and England. The author’s descriptions of his firsthand experiences—a pack’s acceptance of him as a lower member; one wolf’s sensitivity that forged bonds with an emotionally challenged boy otherwise unable to connect with humans—are more engaging than the polemical lectures on ecology and conservation. “Everything has a place in this world,” writes Ellis, “and we can’t be naïve enough to think we can safeguard ourselves if we let other species fail.”
Occasionally heavy handed, but offers a unique perspective on the intersection of man and wild.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-307-46453-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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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