For those seeking the secrets of the Tower of London without actually being imprisoned there, this is just the thing.
When the ravens disappear from the Tower of London, the tale goes, then England will fall—good reason to keep someone on staff to keep the birds happy.
What’s the difference between a raven and a crow? No, it’s not that one’s for the crockpot and one for the oven. There’s much more to it than that, and one of the best people to tell you about the matter is “Yeoman Warder Christopher Skaife, of Her Majesty’s Royal Palace and Fortress the Tower of London, and member of the Sovereign’s Body Guard of the Yeoman Guard Extraordinary,” as the author identifies himself. Rather more informally, he’s the Ravenmaster, the fellow who looks after the resident raven population at the famed Tower of London. This is no easy job; Skaife writes with rueful authority of having to overcome his understandable fears of being put in a cage to study, up close, a bird that for all purposes might as well have been a condor at first glance. His affection for the birds has evolved, though, and he writes movingly of the many ways in which harm can come to them—including, strangely enough, being hurt in a fall. “These days,” he writes, “if a raven dies unexpectedly at the Tower and I’m not sure of the cause of death, I take it to the vets at the London Zoo for a post-mortem." As for the legend, supposedly dating to the time of Charles II, that the health of the birds is correlated to the health of the Crown, Skaife does a nice bit of historical archaeology to dig up evidence for the legend, which turns out to be more modern than advertised. It’s no H Is for Hawk as a literary achievement, but Skaife’s account delivers a pleasing set of anecdotes that will appeal to the Atlas Obscura–reading crowd, to say nothing of corvid fans.
For those seeking the secrets of the Tower of London without actually being imprisoned there, this is just the thing.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-11334-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
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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