A laudable effort that meets with mixed success.
The stage and screen actress delivers a memoir focused on her wildlife conservation work.
When she was the director of the National Endowment for the Arts in the mid-1990s, Alexander (Command Performance: An Actress in the Theater of Politics, 2000, etc.) famously butted heads with Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who was attempting to eliminate support for the arts from the budget. Less well known are the author’s activities in support of the conservation of endangered species. In her second memoir, Alexander chronicles her global travels to remote areas around the world—e.g., Belize, Thailand, Bhutan, Ecuador, Newfoundland, Madagascar—in search of rare wildlife. She describes accounts of the illegal, wanton killing of rhinoceroses for their horns, which are used in traditional Chinese and Indian medicine and sell for as much as $100,000 on the black market. In Thailand, the government imports elephants to satisfy the tourist trade while, at the same time, vast networks of corrupt government officials permit the “slaughtering of tigers and other wild cats to supply the Asian trade in body parts.” Alexander couples this grim picture with enthusiastic accounts of the exotic birds and animals she has seen on her global travels, and the transitions can be jarring. She begins with a report on a 1982 trip to the still relatively undeveloped “birder’s paradise” of Belize, where, despite no sightings, she was thrilled to hear the “deep guttural cough” of a jaguar. The author also describes birding in Peru and recounts the experience of being greeted with a welcoming ceremony by New Guinean villagers in traditional costumes. While many readers will share the author’s concerns about conservation, Alexander provides few new insights into the people and places she has visited, and the narrative hops from place to place without enough connecting elements between the anecdotes.
A laudable effort that meets with mixed success.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-385-35436-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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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