The book doesn’t contain an underlying theme, and Atkins learns most of his history and science from books, but he has an...
A wide-ranging travelogue, covering eight deserts, interspersed with historical accounts of desert geography and travel.
Making up one-sixth of our planet’s land, deserts have fascinated writers since the dawn of Christianity, a group that includes Atkins (The Moor: A Journey into the English Wilderness, 2014), the former editorial director of Pan Macmillan UK. A lucid observer, the author chronicles his travels through the world’s most arid lands, ruminating on their history, natural history, ongoing conditions, and mostly discouraging future. Viewing the world through British eyes, he makes a beeline for the first of his eight deserts, the great Empty Quarter of Saudi Arabia and Oman, a destination of the author’s most flamboyant countrymen, from T.E. Lawrence to Harry St. John Philby, whose paths he has tried to follow. Next up is Australia’s Great Victorian Desert, still partly off-limits as a result of 1950s British nuclear tests and home to a large Indigenous population ejected from their lands to accommodate the tests. No one was ejected from the Kyzylkum Desert in central Asia, but the population was impoverished as Soviet irrigation emptied the Aral Sea. American readers will enjoy the absence of depressing news from Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, and they will also find an account of the nostalgic wackiness of the Burning Man festival. In the Great Sonoran Desert to the southwest, thousands of migrants have died trying to reach the United States. Atkins describes activists who set out water and provisions deep in the desert and the vigilantes and Border Patrol agents who destroy them. Each section begins with a detailed map to help situate readers in the region.
The book doesn’t contain an underlying theme, and Atkins learns most of his history and science from books, but he has an acute eye and delivers unrelated but satisfying journalistic accounts of the world’s hottest, driest regions.Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-53988-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Never especially challenging or provocative but pleasant enough light reading.
Former Dirty Jobs star Rowe serves up a few dozen brief human-interest stories.
Building on his popular podcast, the author “tells some true stories you probably don’t know, about some famous people you probably do.” Some of those stories, he allows, have been subject to correction, just as on his TV show he was “corrected on windmills and oil derricks, coal mines and construction sites, frack tanks, pig farms, slime lines, and lumber mills.” Still, it’s clear that he takes pains to get things right even if he’s not above a few too-obvious groaners, writing about erections (of skyscrapers, that is, and, less elegantly, of pigs) here and Joan Rivers (“the Bonnie Parker of comedy”) there, working the likes of Bob Dylan, William Randolph Hearst, and John Wayne into the discourse. The most charming pieces play on Rowe’s own foibles. In one, he writes of having taken a soft job as a “caretaker”—in quotes—of a country estate with few clear lines of responsibility save, as he reveals, humoring the resident ghost. As the author notes on his website, being a TV host gave him great skills in “talking for long periods without saying anything of substance,” and some of his stories are more filler than compelling narrative. In others, though, he digs deeper, as when he writes of Jason Everman, a rock guitarist who walked away from two spectacularly successful bands (Nirvana and Soundgarden) in order to serve as a special forces operative: “If you thought that Pete Best blew his chance with the Beatles, consider this: the first band Jason bungled sold 30 million records in a single year.” Speaking of rock stars, Rowe does a good job with the oft-repeated matter of Charlie Manson’s brief career as a songwriter: “No one can say if having his song stolen by the Beach Boys pushed Charlie over the edge,” writes the author, but it can’t have helped.
Never especially challenging or provocative but pleasant enough light reading.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-982130-85-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.
A firsthand account of how the Navajo language was used to help defeat the Japanese in World War II.
At the age of 17, Nez (an English name assigned to him in kindergarten) volunteered for the Marines just months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Growing up in a traditional Navajo community, he became fluent in English, his second language, in government-run boarding schools. The author writes that he wanted to serve his country and explore “the possibilities and opportunities offered out there in the larger world.” Because he was bilingual, he was one of the original 29 “code talkers” selected to develop a secret, unbreakable code based on the Navajo language, which was to be used for battlefield military communications on the Pacific front. Because the Navajo language is tonal and unwritten, it is extremely difficult for a non-native speaker to learn. The code created an alphabet based on English words such as ant for “A,” which were then translated into its Navajo equivalent. On the battlefield, Navajo code talkers would use voice transmissions over the radio, spoken in Navajo to convey secret information. Nez writes movingly about the hard-fought battles waged by the Marines to recapture Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and others, in which he and his fellow code talkers played a crucial role. He situates his wartime experiences in the context of his life before the war, growing up on a sheep farm, and after when he worked for the VA and raised a family in New Mexico. Although he had hoped to make his family proud of his wartime role, until 1968 the code was classified and he was sworn to silence. He sums up his life “as better than he could ever have expected,” and looks back with pride on the part he played in “a new, triumphant oral and written [Navajo] tradition,” his culture's contribution to victory.
A unique, inspiring story by a member of the Greatest Generation.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-425-24423-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton Caliber
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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