Sometimes a slog, but of some interest to armchair adventurers and history buffs.
An expedition follows in the footsteps of a century-old Amazon River adventure taken by naturalist and former president Theodore Roosevelt.
Former Sports Illustrated senior writer Moses recounts an expedition organized by a world traveler in constant danger of “looking like a rich guy on vacation” and including a descendant of Roosevelt and a handful of fellow travelers. The goal was to follow the president’s path down an Amazonian tributary called the River of Doubt. The author notes numerous good reasons for the name: Stretches remained poorly known, and there was plenty of doubt whether the region would survive the onslaught of diamond hunters, farmers, and others venturing into land inhabited by Indigenous peoples inclined to defend it. The rich guy, Charlie Haskell, was by Moses’ account a master of conjuring up all manner of gear, but his leadership skills were lacking, and he had a dysfunctional relationship with the truth that provides an odd anticlimax to the book. One oddity, which takes some time to suss out, is that the follow-up expedition took place more than 30 years ago; one wonders about the delay, and Moses scrambles at the end to assemble a where-are-they-now epilogue and its rather dispiriting conclusion that “nature is losing the war between environment and development.” There are fine moments of high adventure amid character studies that don’t always reflect well on the characters in question. Satisfyingly, the expedition succeeded in finding spots visited by President Roosevelt and his associate and guide, the brilliant Brazilian explorer Cândido Rondon. Still, Larry Rohter’s recent book Into the Amazon depicts the more vigorous life of Rondon, and Moses’ narrative lacks the vivid immediacy of Redmond O’Hanlon’s admittedly goofy In Trouble Again, another Amazonian adventure.
Sometimes a slog, but of some interest to armchair adventurers and history buffs.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781639365579
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.
The WNBA star recounts her imprisonment by the Putin regime.
“My horror begins in a land I thought I knew, on a trip I wish I hadn’t taken,” writes Griner. She had traveled to Russia before, playing basketball for the Yekaterinburg franchise of the Russian league during the WNBA’s off-season, but on this winter day in 2022, she was pulled aside at the Moscow airport and subjected to an unexpected search that turned up medically prescribed cannabis oil. As the author notes, at home in Arizona, cannabis is legal, but not in Russia. After initial interrogation—“They seemed determined to get me to admit I was a smuggler, some undercover drug lord supplying half the country”—she was bundled off to await a show trial that was months in coming. With great self-awareness, the author chronicles the differences between being Black and gay in America and in Russia. “When you’re in a system with no true justice,” she writes, “you’re also in a system with a bunch of gray areas.” Unfortunately, despite a skilled Russian lawyer on her side, Griner had trouble getting to those gray areas, precisely because, with rising tensions between the U.S. and Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, Putin’s people seemed intent on making an example of her. Between spells in labor camps, jails, and psych wards, the author became a careful observer of the Russian penal system and its horrors. Navigating that system proved exhausting; since her release following an exchange for an imprisoned Russian arms dealer (about which the author offers a le Carré–worthy account of the encounter in Abu Dhabi), she has been suffering from PTSD. That struggle has invigorated her, though, in her determination to free other unjustly imprisoned Americans, a plea for which closes the book.
A compelling, often chilling look inside today’s version of the Gulag.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780593801345
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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