Lively and well told.
Colorful biography of a geologist who surveyed much of the American West in the mid-19th century.
Wilson, editor of The American Scholar, begins by showing King (1842–1901) in the 1880s, when Henry Adams's circle admired him not only as a man of action but as a brilliant mind and a ready wit. The orphaned son of a New England trading family, King attended Yale's Sheffield Scientific School, where he excelled in geology, the most prestigious science of the era. After the outbreak of the Civil War, King headed west and soon found a job with the California Geological Survey, headed by Josiah Whitney, a friend of his Sheffield professors. There the King legend began, as he scaled unclimbed mountains, gathered mineral specimens and accumulated an impressive list of adventures—a fair number of which Wilson shows to be tall tales. But King's experience led to a job as director of the Fortieth Parallel Survey, charting the territory between California and the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains, in Colorado. This section of the country was important both as a route for the first continental rail lines, and as a possible repository of valuable mineral deposits. Here for the first time, King was leader of an exploration, dependent on the efforts of his team to secure results; while the survey was two years late in finishing, the geological work was some of the most significant of its time. At the end of the survey, King exposed a pair of hoaxers who had conned several wealthy men into investing in a fraudulent diamond mine. At this point the story ends—with King clearly depicted against the background of his time, and his place in 19th-century science firmly established.
Lively and well told.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-6025-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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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