An intriguing account of Button’s troubled life, told with skill and grace.
Imaginative reconstruction of a lost but strangely influential episode in the history of British colonialism.
In 1830, Robert FitzRoy, the new captain of the Beagle, sailed his craft into a natural harbor off Tierra del Fuego, a place of “appalling weather conditions” and “cruel geography.” There they encountered a few weather-beaten natives, a few of whom were commandeered and taken away as specimens for scientists to ponder. Some of these unfortunates died (of smallpox) in passage or soon after landing in England, but one who survived was a young man called Jemmy Button, who was poked and prodded for about a year and then taken back to his homeland when FitzRoy again pointed the Beagle toward South America. Aboard ship with Button this time was the newly hired naturalist Charles Darwin, who saw in the young man evidence of what the ancestors of humankind, “naked and bedaubed with paint . . . their mouths frothed with excitement,” must have been like. Hazlewood hazards that Darwin’s brief encounter with Button influenced the budding scientist’s thoughts on evolution—and Darwin himself wrote, years later, that he would “rather have been descended from [a] heroic little monkey” than from “a savage who delights to torture his enemies.” Having seen the far shores and learned a little English, Button was out of place in his homeland—a place that Hazlewood suggests was indeed not innocent of cannibalism and torture. He acted as something of an unwilling point man for missionaries sent to Christianize his unwilling compatriots, most of whom died in any event of disease and, later, of gunfire from gold-seeking strangers—murders which Button may well have avenged in the slaughter of an unfortunate party of British sailors.
An intriguing account of Button’s troubled life, told with skill and grace.Pub Date: June 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-25213-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2001
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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