Instead, they’re likely to enjoy Dugard’s well-made narrative, and to come away sharing his abundant admiration for the...
A thoroughly readable biography of the famed sea captain and explorer.
Nautically inclined journalist Dugard (Knockdown, 1999, etc.) applies the techniques of the sports-magazine profile to the life of Captain James Cook, the 18th-century mariner who, he notes, metamorphosed through time into both Captain Hook of Peter Pan and Captain Kirk of Star Trek. Dugard’s sometimes breathless, you-are-there approach, though hardly the stuff of standard maritime history, is quite satisfying, capturing Cook’s irrepressible bravery and the spirit of adventure that fueled his circumnavigations. He is also skilled at capturing period detail and of deciphering the intricacies of the English class system—by the rules of which, he observes, Cook should not have enjoyed the success that he did (he was the only noncommissioned officer in the history of the Royal Navy to have risen to the rank of ship commander), given that he was the son of a lower-class Jacobite rebel and was resolutely nonpolitical in a fiercely politicized military culture. Dugard is less satisfying as an interpreter of Cook’s doubtless fine mind, relying (in the absence of solid documentation and in the face of Cook’s own efforts to shield his thoughts) on guesswork and turning to such New Age accouterments as Carl Jung’s personality-typing theories to account for Cook’s manner of doing things (he brands Cook an INTJ—an Introvert, Intuitive, Thinker, Judger—whose “drive to transfer . . . dreams into reality can even come across as eccentric to those who don’t share the vision”). The author’s readiness to speculate so freely will earn him demerits from serious historians, but general readers won’t much mind.
Instead, they’re likely to enjoy Dugard’s well-made narrative, and to come away sharing his abundant admiration for the admirable—and ultimately unfortunate—Cook.Pub Date: June 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-7434-0068-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pocket
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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