In her 14th work of fiction, Bainbridge (An Awfully Big Adventure, 1991, etc.) reconstructs that most poignant of ill-fated journeys, Scott's 1912 South Pole expedition, in the voices of the five explorers who reached the Pole and died soon afterwards. The three-year trip was designed as a scientific expedition as well as a conquest of the Pole. In 1910 the Terra Nova, a converted whaling ship, was seen off with great fanfare in London and Cardiff. Bainbridge imagines an ebullient shipboard mood as the officers play schoolboy games in the wardroom, while in their quieter moments the younger officers fret over whether they are up to the challenge. In fact, they endure uncomplainingly the antarctic cold, treacherous terrain, and round-the-clock midwinter dark. (Bainbridge writes as though she'd traveled every numbing mile herself). These are God-fearing men, exulting in the chance ``to stand up and be counted'' for king and country, yet never mere caricatures of muscular Christianity. Bainbridge gives us five well-differentiated individuals. Especially complex is their leader, ``Con'' Scott, a disciplined yet big-hearted Royal Navy man who for a second loses control, yearning for a shootout, when he hears that Norwegian Roald Amundsen is ahead of them in the race. Sure enough, after a hellish final trek, Scott and company find a Norwegian flag at the Pole. Bainbridge ends her account with team member Oates, filled with morphine, making his celebrated stoic exit into the blizzard. Departing from contemporary woes, Bainbridge has found gold in the dreams of the last big-time explorers unaided by technology. A triumph of sympathetic imagination.
Pub Date: April 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-7867-0071-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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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