A fine travelogue worthy of shelving next to Jonathan Raban and William Least Heat-Moon.
A well-recounted father-and-son journey in the Missouri River country.
That land is definitively Lewis and Clark territory, and that duo figures prominently, though mostly in the mountainous region of the title, a place that Faulkner (Waterwalk: A Passage of Ghosts, 2007)—a Kansas flatlander by way of Virginia—knows well. More, it was the haunt of Pierre Jean De Smet, a Jesuit priest who in 1840 and 1841 traveled the Oregon Trail and in the bargain helped “popularize that arduous journey west.” De Smet makes a good tutelary spirit for the journey, a wise intermediary among the worlds of Europe and Native America, a binary that still exists out on the land. Mixing in accounts by a Nez Perce warrior named White Thunder, Faulkner ventures a “three-legged understanding of the northern half of what was then called the Far West.” To make life interesting, he and his 18-year-old son Alex traveled by a variety of conveyances, including canoes, bicycles, and their own two feet, meeting all sorts of people, from wary sheriffs to itinerant Indians to truckers and scholars. Alex’s presence complicates the narrative, but in good ways, for the father-son business between them is emphatically less fraught than what readers encounter in the kindred spirit of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It’s a pleasure to find the drama in hailstorms and the bawls of grizzly bears instead. Faulkner tells an unadorned, unaffected story, with an occasional tendency to overquote from historical sources more than balanced by his strong descriptions of people and places—e.g., “We are on a high bluff of whitish-grey, speckled limestone, much of it silted over with a thin soil and fringed in blowing prairie grasses.” Among the many high points are a sympathetic reimagining of Little Big Horn and a hell-for-leather bicycle ride down an impossibly steep mountain, “down and down, swerving, leaning, braking, vast treescapes of fir and spruce greeting us at every turn.”
A fine travelogue worthy of shelving next to Jonathan Raban and William Least Heat-Moon.Pub Date: July 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8253-0792-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Beaufort
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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