A lush, intimate portrait of Smith Island, Chesapeake Bay, from Horton (Bay Country, 1987, etc.). With his wife and two children, Horton moved to the hamlet of Tylerton—population a little less than 100—on Smith Island in 1987. He was there to teach environmental education classes to schoolchildren, but he was really on a quest to plumb the spirit of the place, one that ``does not shout its virtues, but yields them only to probing and observation.'' Smith Island is classic Chesapeake material, its citizens harvesting the savory blue crab the bay surrenders in hundreds of millions of pounds each year. But the crab industry offers diminishing returns and is going the way of the now-defunct shad and rockfish fisheries, the towns on the island slowly dying. Horton gets to know the fisherfolk, people who understand ``the invisible, subaqueous Chesapeake . . . as well as a farmer knows the contours of his homeplace,'' maintain the last fleet of working sailcraft (Maryland law requires that only boats under sail dredge for oysters), and stalk terrapin in the off-season. These characters, some of them near-mythic in Smith Island lore, offer Horton the pearls of their experience (there are long swaths of first-person, Islander narrative), and he gorges on them: how the winds and tides move the blue crab about, where the terrapin hide, why the oyster beds have gone flat, how the island population manages. Gratifyingly, the island women get equal air time: describing the quicksilver art of picking crabmeat, the not-so-quicksilver art of giving birth aboard a storm-tossed vessel, how they shape both family life and community from impossibly rough circumstance. Horton is everywhere: taking the island doctor's testimony; marvelling at the island artist's tale; attentive to micro-dialects, sacred groves; tracking the seasons' shifts. ``There is a beauty and eloquence to their lives,'' says an off-island resident. The same could be said of this book. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-393-03938-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.
A revealing biography of the fabled Manhattan hotel, in which generations of artists and writers found a haven.
Turn-of-the century New York did not lack either hotels or apartment buildings, writes Tippins (February House: The Story of W. H. Auden, Carson McCullers, Jane and Paul Bowles, Benjamin Britten, and Gypsy Rose Lee, Under One Roof In Wartime America, 2005). But the Chelsea Hotel, from its very inception, was different. Architect Philip Hubert intended the elegantly designed Chelsea Association Building to reflect the utopian ideals of Charles Fourier, offering every amenity conducive to cooperative living: public spaces and gardens, a dining room, artists’ studios, and 80 apartments suitable for an economically diverse population of single workers, young couples, small families and wealthy residents who otherwise might choose to live in a private brownstone. Hubert especially wanted to attract creative types and made sure the building’s walls were extra thick so that each apartment was quiet enough for concentration. William Dean Howells, Edgar Lee Masters and artist John Sloan were early residents. Their friends (Mark Twain, for one) greeted one another in eight-foot-wide hallways intended for conversations. In its early years, the Chelsea quickly became legendary. By the 1930s, though, financial straits resulted in a “down-at-heel, bohemian atmosphere.” Later, with hard-drinking residents like Dylan Thomas and Brendan Behan, the ambience could be raucous. Arthur Miller scorned his free-wheeling, drug-taking, boozy neighbors, admitting, though, that the “great advantage” to living there “was that no one gave a damn what anyone else chose to do sexually.” No one passed judgment on creativity, either. But the art was not what made the Chelsea famous; its residents did. Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Phil Ochs and Sid Vicious are only a few of the figures populating this entertaining book.
A zesty, energetic history, not only of a building, but of more than a century of American culture.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-618-72634-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.
A ground-level illustration of how the plague ravaged Europe.
For his tenth book, science writer Kelly (Three on the Edge, 1999, etc.) delivers a cultural history of the Black Death based on accounts left by those who witnessed the greatest natural disaster in human history. Spawned somewhere on the steppes of Central Asia, the plague arrived in Europe in 1347, when a Genoese ship carried it to Sicily from a trading post on the Black Sea. Over the next four years, at a time when, as the author notes, “nothing moved faster than the fastest horse,” the disease spread through the entire continent. Eventually, it claimed 25 million lives, one third of the European population. A thermonuclear war would be an equivalent disaster by today's standards, Kelly avers. Much of the narrative depends on the reminiscences of monks, doctors, and other literate people who buried corpses or cared for the sick. As a result, the author has plenty of anecdotes. Common scenes include dogs and children running naked, dirty, and wild through the streets of an empty village, their masters and parents dead; Jews burnt at the stake, scapegoats in a paranoid Christian world; and physicians at the University of Paris consulting the stars to divine cures. These tales give the author opportunities to show Europeans—filthy, malnourished, living in densely packed cities—as easy targets for rats and their plague-bearing fleas. They also allow him to ramble. Kelly has a tendency to lose the trail of the disease in favor of tangents about this or that king, pope, or battle. He returns to his topic only when he shifts to a different country or city in a new chapter, giving the book a haphazard feel. Remarkably, the story ends on a hopeful note. After so many perished, Europe was forced to develop new forms of technology to make up for the labor shortage, laying the groundwork for the modern era.
Occasionally unfocused, but redeems itself by putting a vivid, human face on an unimaginable nightmare.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-000692-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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