These pieces glow like a well-tended smudge fire, fending off the banality of what has come to pass as fishing stories—the pompous pretensions of the competitive jet-set angler—from Wetherell (North of Now, 1997, etc.). Wetherell is not a prolific writer on fly-fishing, though he is one of the best. He is the kind of guy who stops and smells the coffee while astream: Intuition tells him that knowing “something of the landscape, terrain, history, and culture of the region through which your river flows” is infinitely more important than casting talent. It is elusive, that feel for a place, but attentiveness to it is the only game in town for Wetherell. Some of the best accounts in this book are the tours on which he takes readers to various locales, setting the rivers in their context as he tries to learn the quirks and portents of the water. He shares the joys of discovering a river new to him, the upper Connecticut, where the wild trout announce that “life can be ironic and bitter and cruel, and it is only moments and places like these that redeem it.” He takes trips to Maine fishing camps, forgotten outposts now vulnerable as their very rareness and isolation act as enticements. He also visits Vermont fishing clubs that seek to maintain a level of authenticity. Wetherell is enjoyable as the curmudgeon (fuming when he finds a parvenu fishing one of his secret holes—the freebooter is talking on a cell phone too—he wants to “slink back to the 1940s where I belong”), whether complaining about the commercialization of the sport, ripping into “the contemporary fascist style in sportswear,” or detailing the importance of secrecy when it comes to giving out tips. Wetherell doesn’t claim an ability to untie every knot a river throws his way, and there are many. It is a humility that becomes him.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-55821-698-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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