A somewhat informative but unevenly executed remembrance for young Christian readers.
A child of missionaries shares her adventures growing up in the Amazon in this children’s memoir.
The author was born in the Amazon in 1955 to American evangelical missionary parents Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, whose lives she detailed in her previous book, Devotedly (2019). This memoir for children details her time as a child in Ecuador, which included a family tragedy when she was still an infant. Shepard tells the story in the third person, narrating the first several years of her life. Her parents mainly worked with the Quechua people, but they were intrigued by the Waoroni people, who had almost no contact with those outside of their own tribe. Jim ventured out with a group to meet with local Waoroni people as part of their missionary work; there, he and other members of the group were killed. Valerie and her mother spent three more years with the Quechua; eventually, they got to know a Waoroni woman who invited the pair to live with her people; she assured Valerie’s mother that they would be safe, so Valerie and her mother headed out on what would be their greatest adventure. This story is told from the narrow third-person perspective of Valerie and her mother, such that the Indigenous peoples seem robbed of some of their agency. At one point, for example, Valerie asks her mother, “How can the Indians find a dry spot on the bank in the darkness?” Her mother simply replies, “God is taking care of them!” The Waoroni also appear to unquestioningly accept Christianity despite having been so isolationist in the past, which goes unexplained. Still, the story provides many interesting anecdotes of life in the rainforest. That said, after the death of a sick Quechua child, the memoir abruptly ends without completing any clear arc for its characters.
A somewhat informative but unevenly executed remembrance for young Christian readers.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2023
ISBN: 9781629950259
Page Count: 64
Publisher: P&R Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The stormy career of a top Navy SEAL hotspur. Commander Marcinko, USN Ret., recently served time at Petersburg Federal Prison for conspiracy to defraud the Navy by overcharging for specialized equipment—the result, he says, of telling off too many admirals. It seems that his ornery and joyous aggression, nurtured by a Czech grandfather in a flinty Pennsylvania mining town, has brought him to grief in peace and to brilliance in war. Serving his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 as an enlisted SEAL expert in underwater demolition, Marcinko returned for a second tour as an officer leading a commando squad he had trained. Here, his accounts of riverine warfare—creeping underwater to Vietcong boats and slipping over their gunwales; raiding VC island strongholds in the South China Sea; steaming up to the Cambodian border to tempt the VC across and being overrun- -are galvanic, detailed, and told with a true craftsman's love. What did he think of the Vietcong? ``The bastards—they were good.'' His battle philosophy? ``...kill my enemy before he has a chance to kill me....Never did I give Charlie an even break.'' After the aborted desert rescue of US hostages in the Tehran embassy, Marcinko was ordered to create SEAL Team Six—a counterterrorist unit with worldwide maritime responsibilities. In 1983, the unit was deployed to Beirut to test the security of the US embassy there. Easily evading the embassy security detail, sleeping Lebanese guards, and the Marines, the SEALs planted enough fake bombs to level the building. When Marcinko spoke to ``a senior American official'' about the problem, the SEAL's blunt security advice was rejected, particularly in respect to car-bomb attacks. Ninety days later, 63 people in the embassy compound were killed by a suicide bomber driving a TNT-filled truck. Profane and asking no quarter: the real nitty-gritty, bloody and authentic. (Eight-page photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: March 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-671-70390-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1992
Great fun.
The second installment of childhood recollections (after Opposite the Cross Keys, 1988) by mystery writer S.T. Haymon, who here evokes a sheltered 12-year-old's further encounters with life's earthier side.
Haymon's 1920's, upper-middle-class childhood revolved typically around school, home, loyal servants, and a pair of doting, well-educated parents—until age 12, when her father died and her mother decided to move to London. Refusing to accompany her, the precocious, comically self-confident Sylvia tried to limit this series of upheavals by insisting on remaining in Norfolk in the care of a favorite teacher—except that at the last minute her headmistress (already a sworn enemy) switched houses, arranging for two maiden schoolteachers to put Sylvia up in their house instead. Sylvia knew that the Misses Gosse and Locke were eccentric. What she didn't know was that the skinny, aggressive history teacher and the teary, puppy-like math professor were lesbians. Nor did she notice as Miss Locke's increasingly desperate infatuation with her began to lead the entire household toward destruction. Amusing characters abound—the gardener, Sylvia's only ally, whose faith in the value of a virgin's tips on the horse races led him to pay her for advice; the dour housekeeper who sang opera and downed bottles of gin; the art teacher's model who bewildered Sylvia with talk of "randy old dykes"; and the spiritual channel who informed her that her daddy was watching everything she did from heaven. Haymon's depiction of herself as an unusually clever, frequently petulant, and thoroughly practical young girl obsessed with filling her stomach while all sorts of passionate fireworks exploded around her evokes an era when secrets still existed and scandals were bursting to happen—and makes for slyly humorous, very British entertainment.
Great fun.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 1990
ISBN: 312-04986-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
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