That makes for an absorbing story, too, and Rhodes (Masters of Death, 2002, etc.) tells it surpassingly well. Outstanding.
The Pulitzer-winning historian and biographer finds a pleasing subject in an American original: the traveler, chronicler, scientist, painter, and entrepreneur whose name remains legend.
Jean Rabin—his name until he was eight—was born out of wedlock, and though his father and his wife welcomed him into their home in Nantes, all were aware that “in France bastard children were denied inheritance.” Not so in America, to which the renamed, 18-year-old John James Audubon came in 1803, “lean and athletic, unselfconsciously vain . . . his beak of a nose most certifiably French.” He was charged with tending to his father’s business interests, but, Rhodes writes, he had little talent for the work—and besides, he wanted nothing more than “to complete a collection [of ornithological illustrations] not only valuable to the scientific class, but pleasing to every person.” He was single-minded in this devotion, driven, Rhodes suggests in a moment of psychologizing, by a desire “literally to revivify the dead.” Luckily, he found time to wed a singularly patient young English woman, Lucy Bakewell, who traveled with him across the Appalachians to establish a general store, scarcely complaining about the hardships of the journey, even if she did lament that in frontier Louisville, “there is no library here or bookstore . . . and as Mr. Audubon is constantly at the store I should often enjoy a book very much whilst I am alone.” The great virtue here is not so much in giving a thorough, modern life of Audubon, which Shirley Streshinsky did with her Audubon: Life and Art in the American Wilderness (1993); it is in making Lucy Audubon a full partner in the enterprise, if neglected to the point of near abandonment while her husband cultivated his art and his fame, consciously crafting an image as definitively American—at least as far as his European patrons were concerned—as Daniel Boone’s.
That makes for an absorbing story, too, and Rhodes (Masters of Death, 2002, etc.) tells it surpassingly well. Outstanding.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41412-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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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