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MR. HORNADAY'S WAR

Name: MR. HORNADAY'S WAR
Author: Stefan Bechtel
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0635-1

HOW A PECULIAR VICTORIAN ZOOKEEPER WAGED A LONELY CRUSADE FOR WILDLIFE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

by Stefan Bechtel ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2012

The book will appeal to readers curious about the beginning of wildlife conservation in America, but it won’t provide much...

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A biography of a man whose life was intertwined with the conservation movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Starting with William Temple Hornaday’s (1854–1937) discovery that the American buffalo were being hunted to extinction, Men’s Health founding editor Bechtel (Roar of the Heavens, 2007, etc.) tells the story of Hornaday’s life and how he became the man who would bring the buffalo back to the prairies. Raised on a farm in Indiana, Hornaday was exposed to taxidermy early in his life and pursued a career in that field through his teen and college years. After landing a job in a museum, he decided, at age 19, to mount his first expedition to obtain exotic animals. Trips to Florida, South America, India and Borneo made Hornaday a minor celebrity adventurer and helped him land a job at the Smithsonian and eventually as the director of the Bronx Zoo. Bechtel focuses mainly on Hornaday’s conservation work, using his childhood, taxidermy work and expeditions to show how he became interested in the movement. Many of the passages about conservation are repetitive, and Bechtel’s tone varies as he clearly struggles with his admiration for Hornaday’s efforts to preserve wildlife and his misgivings about the hunting of animals for display. While there is a short section on his work to save seals and a larger section on birds, the focus frequently returns to Hornaday’s work with the buffalo. Bechtel’s passion for his subject makes the book an interesting and enjoyable though occasionally preachy read.

The book will appeal to readers curious about the beginning of wildlife conservation in America, but it won’t provide much new information to serious Hornaday fans who have already read his own accounts of these exploits.

Pub Date: May 15, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-8070-0635-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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INTO THE WILD

by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).

Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)