A thorough and admiring portrait.
From prolific mountaineering writer Roberts (Devil’s Gate: Brigham Young and the Great Mormon Handcart Tragedy, 2008, etc.), a well-crafted biography of “the greatest mountaineer in Alaskan history.”
Because the author knows the world of climbing so well, as both practitioner and chronicler, he brings an insider’s perspective to this life of mountaineer and photographer Bradford Washburn (1910–2007). As a longtime friend of his subject, Roberts writes with measured authority about Washburn as a character, especially his overwhelming passion, impatience and stubbornness. In describing Washburn’s vast explorations in Alaska and the Yukon, his extraordinary number of first ascents and the sharpening of the “increasingly virtuosic exercises in the fast-and-light style he had invented,” Roberts avoids hagiography—no small feat given Washburn’s prodigious talents. Not only did he fill in many blank areas on maps of the northern regions of North America, Washburn brought great flair to the art of cartography and aerial photography, as well as museum administration—he transformed “the moribund New England Museum of Natural History into the eventually world-renowned Boston Museum of Science.” Though unadorned, Roberts’s style effectively captures the suspense and danger of Washburn’s adventures.
A thorough and admiring portrait.Pub Date: July 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-156094-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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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