Though a footnote to broader studies of Roosevelt, this book offers well-considered interpretations of “the brainy...
Teddy Roosevelt: not just hunter, but also gatherer.
Young Theodore took inspiration from the yarns of a “novelist and adventurer” named Capt. Thomas Mayne Reid, who blended hunting, natural history, and exploration into stories guaranteed to captivate a frail and bookish lad. It was under Reid’s spell, writes Smithsonian Institution mammalogist and curator Lunde, that Teddy began his own natural history collection, starting off with a much-prized seal skull (the rest of the body, we learn, was too decayed to keep) and building from there. At about the same time, he was privy to planning sessions held in his family home for what would become the American Museum of Natural History. Lunde writes that the well-connected young man could easily have become a staff curator, but, inspired by his reading and research and his father’s exhortations, he headed for the wild. In this pursuit, he mirrored many other naturalists who went into the field with notebook in one hand and rifle in the other. If much of Lunde’s account is a straightforward biography of Roosevelt in scientific mode, a distinct subtext is a kind of nostalgia for the natural history of old and for the “intrepid museum naturalist” whose era “may very well be coming to an end.” The author turns up some interesting tidbits on the future president’s expeditions, including a lion-hunting trip to Africa helped along by guides in ways that recent critics of a certain Minnesota dentist may recognize; it is useful to learn from Lunde that Roosevelt also had plenty of critics in his own time who decried his apparent bloodlust. More useful still is Lunde’s portrait of Roosevelt as a kind of working amateur scientist in communication with professionals and other amateurs to build scientific institutions and, indeed, field science itself.
Though a footnote to broader studies of Roosevelt, this book offers well-considered interpretations of “the brainy naturalist and muscular adventurer.”Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-307-46430-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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