An enthusiastic account: Gifford clearly relishes the chance to retrace his idol’s steps.
The travails of an elusive 18th-century traveler, brought to life by a biographer who goes to great lengths to get under his subject’s skin.
Little is known about John Ledyard (1751–89). Indeed, first-time author Gifford tells us, we don’t even know for sure what Ledyard looked like; the portrait on the book’s cover, like all other surviving images of Ledyard, was painted long after his death. Fortunately, plenty of written documentation remains, much of it written in Ledyard’s own hand, and Gifford liberally sprinkles his own text with quotations from his subject. The Connecticut-born Ledyard attended Dartmouth College for a while and in 1776 sailed into history with Captain James Cook (they embarked on a four-year expedition during which they “discovered” Hawaii). Gifford neatly divides his work between a retelling of that historic journey and reminiscences of his own weeklong, $200-a-day stint aboard a replica of Cook’s ship. Ledyard’s journal of the Cook expedition provides plenty of insight, although Gifford points out that it was written three years after the fact and contains many dates and names that don’t match those in other historical accounts. The author also offers evidence that some of Ledyard’s personal papers have been tampered with: He discovered one letter with a passage about a meeting with a married prostitute that had been crossed out, possibly by an overly protective relative; the passage does not appear in the three-volume transcript of Ledyard documents in Dartmouth College Library. Continuing to shadow the explorer’s movements (a journey to Siberia is particularly enthralling), Gifford concludes with an account of Ledyard’s death, which occurred just before he was about to undertake another gallant trek, this time through Africa. Fittingly, his corpse was never discovered.
An enthusiastic account: Gifford clearly relishes the chance to retrace his idol’s steps.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-101218-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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
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