by Steve A. Anderson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 4, 2015
A fine trove of byways—Pig Trail, Twentymile Bottom—with a guide who knows how to stop and smell the hops.
Combination how-to book and guide to the secret pleasures of 21 nationwide highway motorcycle voyages, featuring plenty of craft-brewed beer.
More than a few folks would call these voyages heaven, and Anderson, a veteran of such adventures, paints the tours just so. The how-to element is like a checklist pilots go through before lifting off: what will you need to meet the weather, what equipment will prove invaluable, credit card scams to avoid, what’s in the medicine kit, when should you go with a group, when should you go it alone, etc. The guidebook provides the big picture: which are the best highways, what time of year is best to maximize visuals, etc. Decent color maps help, and photos will inspire your own notions of what to bring, be it a fishing rod, climbing equipment, or birder gear. The meat of the book is in its tips, which are plentiful and range from biking etiquette to the best huckleberry patch in Oregon. The point of these road trips is to get you into unique environments where you’ll become intensely aware of your surroundings in landscapes so remote that the only people you’ll see are the same ones over and over again amid back stretches of the Natchez Trace and all those microbrews. “They offered up a shot of tequila at one of the stops, but I advised them that I was good with the beer we had for breakfast,” says Anderson, who never had more than one for breakfast. Tongue in cheek, hopefully, Anderson writes, “You may consider carrying your passport as an option but also be reminded of no weapons or firearms if you do proceed north.” Though he claims to be not much of a writer, with the exception of occasional clownishness—“I do leave tight pants to the ladies”—the pleasingly unvarnished writing goes down smooth.
A fine trove of byways—Pig Trail, Twentymile Bottom—with a guide who knows how to stop and smell the hops.Pub Date: July 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9964781-1-3
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Steamboat Pubs
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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