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MR. HORNADAY'S WAR

Name: MR. HORNADAY'S WAR
Author: Stefan Bechtel
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0635-1

HOW A PECULIAR VICTORIAN ZOOKEEPER WAGED A LONELY CRUSADE FOR WILDLIFE THAT CHANGED THE WORLD

by Stefan Bechtel ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2012

The book will appeal to readers curious about the beginning of wildlife conservation in America, but it won’t provide much...

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A biography of a man whose life was intertwined with the conservation movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Starting with William Temple Hornaday’s (1854–1937) discovery that the American buffalo were being hunted to extinction, Men’s Health founding editor Bechtel (Roar of the Heavens, 2007, etc.) tells the story of Hornaday’s life and how he became the man who would bring the buffalo back to the prairies. Raised on a farm in Indiana, Hornaday was exposed to taxidermy early in his life and pursued a career in that field through his teen and college years. After landing a job in a museum, he decided, at age 19, to mount his first expedition to obtain exotic animals. Trips to Florida, South America, India and Borneo made Hornaday a minor celebrity adventurer and helped him land a job at the Smithsonian and eventually as the director of the Bronx Zoo. Bechtel focuses mainly on Hornaday’s conservation work, using his childhood, taxidermy work and expeditions to show how he became interested in the movement. Many of the passages about conservation are repetitive, and Bechtel’s tone varies as he clearly struggles with his admiration for Hornaday’s efforts to preserve wildlife and his misgivings about the hunting of animals for display. While there is a short section on his work to save seals and a larger section on birds, the focus frequently returns to Hornaday’s work with the buffalo. Bechtel’s passion for his subject makes the book an interesting and enjoyable though occasionally preachy read.

The book will appeal to readers curious about the beginning of wildlife conservation in America, but it won’t provide much new information to serious Hornaday fans who have already read his own accounts of these exploits.

Pub Date: May 15, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-8070-0635-1

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Beacon Press

Review Posted Online: March 12, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012

Categories:

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.