Revelatory and heart-gladdening.
An unhurried, knowledgeable tour of New York City’s waterfronts via catboat.
Kornblum (Sociology/CUNY) might make light of his sailing prowess, but he is intimately acquainted with the archipelago of New York. From City to Ellis and Liberty islands, but also to Prall’s, Shooters, and the Brothers, gloomy South and gloomier North, the author knows them all. In his 24-foot catboat, Tradition, he starts out from his homeport of Long Beach, sailing and puttering his way west along the barrier beach, up into Jamaica Bay, out into the Lower and then up into the Upper Bay, along the East River, and through Hell Gate. Along the way, Kornblum describes the act of sailing these waters (he has a gratifying number of boating fiascoes) and weaves his firsthand experiences into the historical narrative of his route. He has lots of good stories and background material, conveyed in a voice just scholarly enough to let you know he has done his research. But the tone is also personal; makes clear he has lived much of his understanding of the area. Kornblum will tell you why a prime piece of Rockaway beachfront is dune and grass rather than luxury condos (the reason isn’t pretty, nor is the way in which racism has shaped the look of the coastline); how waterways became the haunts of privateers, pirates, and today’s smugglers of human cargo; and all about sociological environs like the Irish Riviera, biological ones like Gateway (a national park “devoted to unheroic species”), and scary ones like the 1950s wetlands, “outside the law, and a good dumping ground for murdered gangsters and the hulks of stolen cars.” Few get to see the city from this angle, and Kornblum’s watery transit finds not only a past but perhaps even a future for New York City’s shoreline, with stirrings of restoration as natural habitats are allowed to regain their health.
Revelatory and heart-gladdening.Pub Date: May 17, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-265-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 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.
