The feral escapades of a creative wunderkind stitched together with novelistic zeal.
Lively biography of an award-winning 19th-century taxidermist.
Carl Akeley (1864–1926) began his career as a nature-loving natural-history museum apprentice in New York “skinning birds” for ladies’ hats. He soon became disillusioned after being viewed as a loafer, repeatedly sabotaged by others in his field or fired. Kirk (Creative Writing/Univ. of Pennsylvania) skillfully illuminates an era that saw “a dawning sensitivity to the plight of wildlife” as Akeley went relatively unnoticed until several of his best pieces were being sold at premium prices by the same museum curator who’d terminated him. His ascent to greatness began to take hold in 1886 when, after relocating to Wisconsin and then Chicago, Akeley exercised his burgeoning technical skill by creating an exclusive habitat diorama using cement casts, wooden pedestals and iron rods. He also developed a particularly rare skill with papier mache, used to fashion even more “eerily lifelike” exhibits. With footnotes and photographs, Kirk steers his consistently entertaining narrative away from Akeley’s in-house work to focus on the taxidermist’s many years spent adventuring on safari in the African jungle with dignitaries like Theodore Roosevelt. These tantalizing expeditions challenged Akeley, who seemed drawn to working with elephants and gorillas, but never prepared him for the dangers of the call of the wild. The author shines in his reanimation of Africa’s inherent dangers as Akeley risked his life on safari battling ravenous leopards, charging elephants, five-hour hikes without rations and debilitating fevers—including the one that would take his life in 1926.
The feral escapades of a creative wunderkind stitched together with novelistic zeal.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9282-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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