Touches of American history, up close and personal, from an educator’s scrapbook.
A practitioner of “living history” recounts, among odd bits of America’s past, some of his life story so far.
This personal take on the art of historiography is about the professional career of Grove (co-author: The Museum Educator’s Manual, 2009), who is currently chief of “museum learning” at the National Air and Space Museum. The author first tasted living history at Colonial Williamsburg and learned how to mount interactive museum presentations at Washington’s Smithsonian Institution, where he was once able to sneak a ride atop a refurbished high-wheel bicycle. We hear of notables, like Marcus Garvey and John Brown, who are represented in the National Portrait Gallery, where Grove also assisted. He also offers a history of the gallery’s venerable building and a chronicle of the goings-on at Harpers Ferry. In the Museum of American History’s “Hands on History Room,” Grove was able to demonstrate the mechanics of a cotton gin and tell how conservators tend to the original Stars and Stripes. He joined the Missouri Historical Society to celebrate the bicentennial of Lewis and Clark’s journey of discovery. Thus, we are introduced to legendary Sacagawea, mourn over the murdered buffalo and hear about the smelly grizzly pelt required for a display. The author chronicles his presentation of instructive relics at the National Air and Space Museum and provides some information about how Charles and Anne Lindbergh prepared for their adventures. Though he’s not fond of battlefield re-enactments, Grove thoroughly enjoys re-creating the past with appropriate objects. Essentially about the author’s career in educating with artifacts, his account makes snippets of American history accessible to casual readers, who may learn of the utility of mules, the history of airmail and such miscellanea.
Touches of American history, up close and personal, from an educator’s scrapbook.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8032-4972-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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