A vivacious study that will surely revive interest in the writings of this towering explorer and ethnographer.
Canadian author Bown (The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen, 2012, etc.) fashions a thorough, insightful biography of the fearless explorer and noted writer Knud Rasmussen (1879-1933).
Rasmussen translated his love of his native Greenland into painstaking chronicles of the Inuit culture gleaned over three decades of arduous, groundbreaking exploration. His extraordinary upbringing played a significant role in his remarkable ability to infiltrate the Inuit tribes and become a trusted scribe among them. The son of a Danish missionary who made “herculean dogsled expeditions to the farthest regions of his sprawling parsonage,” Rasmussen learned early on the local Greenlandic language (his mother’s heritage) and a love of hunting and bobsled culture. After being sent to school in Copenhagen and deciding he was not going to be an actor, he hit on journalistic writing as a profession. He made an initial inspirational trip to Lapland to chronicle the culture of the Sami people, developing the themes that would obsess him the rest of his life—namely, the vanishing of the traditional old ways “to the juggernaut of modernity,” where “tradition and myth were replaced with the soullessness of the market economy.” Beginning with the Danish Literary Expedition across northern Greenland (1903-1904), which yielded the wildly popular work People of the Polar North, Rasmussen and his trusty companion Peter Freuchen would embark over the next decades on numerous Thule Expeditions, taking them far into the recesses of Inuit tribes and producing extensive and significant records of vanishing worlds. Bown emphasizes the sheer vitality and charisma of Rasmussen, who shared his celebrity spotlight with the Inuit hunters, dog-sled drivers, and others who were key to the success of the expeditions.
A vivacious study that will surely revive interest in the writings of this towering explorer and ethnographer.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-306-82282-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Merloyd Lawrence/Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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