Anka Muhlstein, known for her biographies of Queen Victoria and James Rothschild (not reviewed), here traces the life of Robert Cavalier de La Salle, early French explorer of the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and Texas and founder of Louisiana. She paints a pretty gripping picture of 17th-century Canada, with its tension between brawling, murderous Montreal, populated by coureurs de bois (backwoodsmen) and drunken Indians, and sober Quebec, with its farmers and administrators. We see the forests teeming with horseflies and edible ants, Iroquois war bands slaughtering Illinois villages—landscapes (to the French) terrifying, strange, and irresistible. Made owner of the land around a primitive fort called Frontenac on Lake Ontario in 1675, La Salle enriched himself via the beaver trade and mounted grueling voyages across the frozen wastes with a lifelong Indian guide, Nika. La Salle was unique among early European explorers by virtue of his intimacy with the native people, whose language he spoke. Muhlstein tries to convey something of the absurdity and unease that characterized most contacts between Europeans and Indians but is always constrained by the anecdotal nature of her enterprise. She manages simply to show La Salle's own shrewd humanity. But visionary as he was and probably, at times, half-insane, his fantastical courage and endurance could not cope with the complexity of large-scale official operations, and when he was finally commissioned by Louis XIV in 1687 to found a settlement in the territory that was not yet called Louisiana, the expedition ended in devastation and mutiny. Muhlstein's book is simply and graphically written, geared to the general reader who wants to feel the raw barbarity of frontier life rather than wade through the socioeconomic intricacies of colonial history. This makes the narrative accessible and vivid, though a surprising absence of maps makes the geographical meanderings somewhat hard to follow. Perhaps it is erroneously assumed that contemporary readers know their country as well as La Salle did.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55970-219-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
