Enthusiasts will love it; others may grow bored.
The editor in chief of Living Bird magazine writes about his favorite feathered friends.
Noted for tracking down the famously elusive ivory-billed woodpecker (The Grail Bird, 2005), ornithologist Gallagher is also an ardent falconer. His boundary-stretching memoir chronicles coming of age with birds of prey. Reared in a bleakly dysfunctional family, the author discovered in adolescence a lifelong idol: Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, author of the classic text on keeping and training raptors. Gallagher’s admiration for Frederick gave rise in later years to an Italian tour in homage to his hero. He offers a report on what he did on that vacation, the interesting spots he missed and the crafty locals who took his luggage. It was depressing, but the author discovered good cheer as well during soulful trips to famous grouse moors, meetings and group hunts with colorful, world-class falconers. Indeed, most of his book concerns adventures and fellowship with the artists who train and run these darting and diving feathered hunters. Falconry is an art, Gallagher declares, proffering a rapturous vision of the sport that has spanned continents and millennia, in addition to his recollections of all the old fowlers and birds he will never meet again. Tiercel prairie falcons, Cooper’s hawks, Gyrfalcons and buteos throng his pages, as do the tools of the trade: hoods, creances, swivels, jesses and, recently, telemetry devices. Pigeons, ducks, mice and rabbits are clobbered, albeit with grace and intelligence, in a narrative quite red in beak and claw. Gallagher’s favorite bird is named Macduff, but it’s readers not totally enraptured with hunting birds perched on gauntleted fists who are likely to be the first to cry “Hold, enough!”
Enthusiasts will love it; others may grow bored.Pub Date: May 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-618-80575-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
