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THIS IS DINOSAUR

Name: THIS IS DINOSAUR
Author: Wallace Stegner
ISBN: 0911797122

ECHO PARK COUNTRY AND ITS MAGIC RIVERS

edited by Wallace Stegner ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 9, 1955

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An eloquent, practical and convincing plea to abandon the project of constructing the Echo Park Dam on the Utah-Colorado border for hydroelectric power, comes in the form of several articles by people in various occupations, all of whom have the common desire to preserve one of our few remaining wilderness areas for rest and recreation. In his own essay, Wallace Stegner points to the natural wonders of the district. It is full of wonderful scenery; it is a rich archeological site of Indian cultures and of the bones of prehistoric animals- all of which the proposed dam would destroy by gouging out and submerging the land around the Green and Yampa Rivers. Articles by Eliot Blackwelder on geology; by Olaus Murie and Joseph Penfold on animals; by Robert Lister on ancient Indian settlements, and others- give information of general as well as particular interest and are a powerful persuasion to leave the area unimpaired. An extensive photographic supplement shows many of its striking beauties.

Pub Date: May 9, 1955

ISBN: 0911797122

Page Count: 93

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1955

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ON TEACHING AND WRITING FICTION
by Wallace Stegner

- BOOK REVIEW
THE UNEASY CHAIR
by Wallace Stegner

- BOOK REVIEW
MARKING THE SPARROW'S FALL
by Wallace Stegner

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THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

by William Strunk & E.B. White ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1972

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...

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Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.

Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").

Pub Date: May 15, 1972

ISBN: 0205632645

Page Count: 105

Publisher: Macmillan

Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972

Categories:

GENERAL NONFICTION

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SLEEPERS

by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995

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An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)