Given that the fight continues to protect wild horses and ban the slaughter of horses of whatever kind, this book is timely,...
Modest tale of a scrappy advocate for wild horses and her three-decade battle for their protection.
Canadian writers Cruise and Griffiths (co-authors: Vancouver: A Novel, 2003, etc.) seem a touch surprised at the total package that was Velma Johnston, a secretary turned cage-rattler. She was stricken by polio at an early age, drank copiously, smoked constantly and seemed unafraid of anything. Her husband was a cowboy and bar-brawler, yet a lover of poetry, one of the “literary cowpokes.” Johnston was converted from a Nevada ranch wife who shared her neighbors’ views that the wild horses that populated the remote canyons of the Sierra were enemies in a long war of broken fences and raided herds. Her road-to-Damascus moment came when she witnessed the aftermath of a round-up in which battered mustangs were herded onto trucks to be slaughtered for dog food. She enlisted like-minded Nevadans and outsiders such as photographer Gus Bundy, who documented fearfully abusive hunts for wild horses from pickup trucks and helicopters, and later the writer Marguerite Henry. Johnston eventually took her fight to Washington, D.C., where she recruited still more unlikely allies. One of the virtues of the authors’ account is its look at how libertarian conservatives such as Manchester Guardian publisher William Loeb and Dixiecrat politico Walter Baring helped advance her cause—and how Johnston eventually secured Dwight Eisenhower’s signature on a protective law known as the “Wild Horse Annie bill” that she then fought, for many years, to put teeth in.
Given that the fight continues to protect wild horses and ban the slaughter of horses of whatever kind, this book is timely, though it pales next to Deanne Stillman’s Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West (2008).Pub Date: March 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-5335-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
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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