A moving homage and an adventure story that artfully articulates the ferocities of nature and humanity.
Blue Ridge Outdoors editor in chief Harlan intimately and expansively profiles a fearless Southern island dweller.
A small, bridgeless barrier island off the Georgia coast, Cumberland is home to countless endangered species and three major ecosystem regions. It is also home to Carol Ruckdeschel, a self-taught biologist who has integrated herself into the lush landscape and lived off the land for much of her adult life. Harlan met this intrepid “Jane Goodall of sea turtles” while he was a park ranger and shadowed her for two decades, impeccably documenting in field notes and journals her ramshackle cabin life of “packrat practicality.” Ruckdeschel was a rowdy only child born during the early stages of World War II, a solitary, curious tomboy who skipped church to commune with feral cats and turtles while her father taught her to shoot rifles and appreciate liquor. Her interest in the biological world bled into young adulthood; she was obsessed with dissecting animal carcasses as she taught herself outdoor skills and drank, which expelled her from college. Undeterred, Ruckdeschel immersed herself in natural history studies and married the first of her three husbands, all of whom she would divorce. Perhaps to soothe a broken heart, Harlan presumes, she retreated for the marshes and mountains of Cumberland, where she has resided as an increasingly feral inhabitant ever since. Her grass-roots activism has kept her spirited love of the island and its wild inhabitants sustained as she forcefully combats developers thirsty to capitalize on the land’s natural resources and sweeping vistas. Harlan’s painstaking detailing of the island’s history includes the legacy of the Carnegie family and the ruins of their antebellum plantation houses and mansions. Ruckdeschel’s extremist legacy and tireless wilderness preservation campaigns are sweepingly recorded here in arresting detail.
A moving homage and an adventure story that artfully articulates the ferocities of nature and humanity.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2258-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
© Copyright 2026 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.
