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IN THE VALLEYS OF THE NOBLE BEYOND

Name: IN THE VALLEYS OF THE NOBLE BEYOND
Author: John Zada
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2935-2

IN SEARCH OF THE SASQUATCH

by John Zada ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2019

An entertaining, provocative exercise in cryptozoology, best read with a modicum of suspended disbelief.

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Bigfoot lives—maybe, as this X-Files–worthy tale reveals.

Toronto-based journalist Zada, who has written for the Globe & Mail, the CBC, the Toronto Star, and other publications, goes a touch out on a limb to ponder sights seen but not proven: namely, spottings of the Sasquatch, or Bigfoot, a kind of half-human, half-ape that inhabits the ancient woods of the Northwest. Traveling deep into the old-growth forests of British Columbia, he had a look for himself, and it’s not too much of a spoiler to say that he adds to the seen/unproven inventory. The fact that no definitive evidence has ever been produced, admits the author, puts the Sasquatch in a category of critter “considered by most people to be no more real than fairies or gnomes.” Bigfoot believers, he adds, explain the lack of evidence by the rarity and shyness of the creature, who knows better than to get too close to humans—even though some of the people Zada talks with, locals and visitors, claim to have seen the giants lurking at the edges of forest hamlets. Having been spooked by a sighting in a dark, dense patch of woods, Zada is inclined to believe, though he’s a good enough journalist to know that assertion without evidence isn’t likely to sway skeptics. As for true believers, well, there are plenty, many of them telling secondhand stories, such as one of a hunter who had Bigfoot in his sights but didn’t pull the trigger “because it was too human-looking.” Human, yes, and not bear, as so many claim, nor Yeti, maybe, Zada concludes, it’s not provably seen because those who are looking for it are just trying too hard. “As soon as you stop trying,” he writes, “your odds suddenly change.” Believe or don’t, the author writes nimbly and well, and his story is modest and evenhanded even as he lets us know just where he stands.

An entertaining, provocative exercise in cryptozoology, best read with a modicum of suspended disbelief.

Pub Date: July 2, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-8021-2935-2

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly

Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019

Categories:

CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | GENERAL CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES

- PROFILES
John Zada

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A PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES

by Howard Zinn ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1979

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For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979

ISBN: 0061965588

Page Count: 772

Publisher: Harper & Row

Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979

Categories:

- BOOK REVIEW
A YOUNG PEOPLE'S HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
by Howard Zinn ; adapted by Rebecca Stefoff with by Ed Morales

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUTH HAS A POWER OF ITS OWN
by Howard Zinn with Ray Suarez

- BOOK REVIEW
THE HISTORIC UNFULFILLED PROMISE
by Howard Zinn

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I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS

by Maya Angelou ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1969

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.

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Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."

Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynchingâ€”and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."

However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.