Yeomanly treatment of a man who “wanted desperately to make his fortune but was seduced by the quest for knowledge.” (65...
Rich with incident and novelty, the life of a swashbuckler whose exploits and writings impressed generations of readers, including Darwin and Humboldt, though he’s little remembered today.
Thoroughly dazzled by their subject, the authors aim to redress that injustice. Nonfiction veteran Diana Preston (The Boxer Rebellion, 2000, etc.) and husband Michael convey Dampier’s life in punchy, declarative sentences, strained only by the sheer plentitude of his doings. Most of the material comes from his published works; Dampier pretty much invented the modern travel narrative, fashioning bestsellers borne on “the accessibility of his writing and the exoticism of his experience.” Much of the rest comes from records at the Court of Admiralty; he was also an active buccaneer and a lousy leader of men. Cut of standard English piratical cloth, this rumbustious plunderer of Spanish ships and towns always had an eye skinned for booty or opportunities for ransom. His pioneering qualities and inexhaustible curiosity made him a natural star in an age “when inquiry was fashionable and ingenuity admired.” The Prestons present Dampier as an ambiguous figure, a man who would engage himself in daring and bloody raids, then turn around and write A Discourse of Trade-Winds, Breezes, Storms, Seasons of the Year, Tides, and Currents. He was hungry not just for filthy lucre, which often evaded his grasp, but also for appreciating and appraising the strange lands he visited as he circumnavigated the globe the times. (He visited Australia years before Cook.) No silver or gold? No problem for Dampier, who would take his payment in observations of flamingoes so numerous they looked like “a wall of new brick” (pink, 17th-century brick, that is), or in hunting with the raja of Mindanao, or in savoring the local oysters.
Yeomanly treatment of a man who “wanted desperately to make his fortune but was seduced by the quest for knowledge.” (65 b&w illustrations, 12 maps)Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8027-1425-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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