A riveting account by a compassionate, dedicated man.
The story of a leading conservationist’s efforts to save a dangerously threatened animal,\ and of his role as a mediator in a failed attempt to end armed conflict in Uganda.
Anthony (who died in early 2012) and Spence (The Elephant Whisperer: My Life in the African Wild, 2009, etc.) describe the illegal trade in rhino horns—used for traditional medicine in Asian countries—as so lucrative that it rivals drug trafficking. These magnificent animals, threatened with extinction, were being left to bleed to death, mainly because “on the streets of China or Vietnam, ounce for ounce the horn is more valuable than gold.” As the founder of the international conservation group Earth Organization, Anthony felt called upon to act. When a journalist informed him that fewer than 15 of the rare subspecies of Northern White Rhino were still living, he decided to mount an international effort to save them. To protect the animals from poachers, it would be necessary to remove them from their home in the Garamba National Park, located in a war-ravaged part of Congo. The area was also home to the Ugandan Lord's Resistance Army, a terrorist group that had been fighting a 20-year war. After several reconnaissance visits, and despite securing agreements of support from the various governments and international agencies involved in the area, Anthony came to the realization that unless he could guarantee the safety of park rangers, he would not receive on-the-ground support for a rescue attempt. This led him to make contact with the LRA in an attempt to broker a safe-conduct agreement for the rescue effort. They agreed, and to his surprise, he was asked for help in brokering a peace treaty.
A riveting account by a compassionate, dedicated man.Pub Date: July 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-250-00451-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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