A candid and humane memoir of a fascinating life.
A novelist and bestselling nonfiction writer’s account of her life and how she became a respected observer of the natural world.
Thomas (The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World, 2009, etc.) grew up a city girl in Cambridge, Massachusetts, not far from Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. From her engineer father, she came to love the wonders of the sky, and from her anthropologist mother, she learned that all creatures “were on earth to be cared for.” Direct experience with nature came from weekends and summers spent in rural New Hampshire. But thanks to the observational skills her parents encouraged her to hone, Thomas also learned about nature while watching the family’s cats and dogs. As a teenager, she traveled with her parents to the Kalahari to study the Ju/wasi people where she learned about “the rules that evolution set out for each species.” Though she longed to study biology in college, Thomas majored in English instead in part to prepare to be an articulate 1950s wife able to “enhance her husband.” Even as she fulfilled social expectations for marriage and motherhood, her experience with anthropological fieldwork brought brilliant opportunities for research. A Guggenheim fellowship allowed Thomas to study the Dodoth people of Uganda. Later, the New Yorker gave her funds to travel to Nigeria, where her research into tribal life was interrupted by the start of a devastating civil war. Yet the good fortune and privilege that also allowed her to study lions in Namibia and wolves on Baffin Island did not render her immune from the vagaries of life. The author also battled alcoholism and contended with tragedies that left her daughter paralyzed and her son with a brain injury. Both wise and witty, Thomas’ book celebrates nature as the best tonic for the “poison” that inevitably infiltrates even the most comfortable of human lives.
A candid and humane memoir of a fascinating life.Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60358-639-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Chelsea Green
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
