Fine entertainment for adventure buffs, solidly researched and fluently told.
An action-packed recounting of one of the most famous incidents in the history of exploration.
Until well into the 19th century, European geography textbooks portrayed central Africa as a vast, uncharted wasteland, almost certainly a graveyard for any outsider unwise enough to enter it. The Scottish explorer David Livingstone almost single-handedly rewrote the record with his travels between 1841 and 1863, when “he saw for himself that Africa’s interior was a marvelous mosaic of highlands, light woodlands, tropical rain forest, plateaus, mountain ranges, coastal wetlands, river deltas, deserts, and thick forests.” Through Livingstone’s expedition reports, armchair travelers were able to gain knowledge of the 20 million or so tribal people who lived in this huge area and of their “hidden civilizations,” while would-be colonizers searched through Livingstone’s pages to determine where to land their invasion forces. All well and good, until, in the late 1860s, Livingstone and a large entourage disappeared somewhere between Zanzibar and Lake Tanganyika while poking around for the source of the Nile. Enter New York Herald correspondent Henry Morton Stanley, who, “charging through life with a massive chip on his shoulder,” as explorer and popular historian Dugard (Farther Than Any Man, 2001, etc.) writes, was no mean adventurer himself. Braving disease, difficult terrain, and all manner of deprivation, Stanley toddled around southeastern Africa for three years on Livingstone’s trail, despairing of ever finding the senior explorer: “The Apostle of Africa is always on my mind. And as day after day passes without starting to find him, I find myself subject to fits of depression. Indeed, I have many things to depress me.” In one of the first great instances of a wag-the-dog story, Stanley’s quest became more famous than Livingstone’s, with the words he uttered on finally encountering the Scotsman—“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”—being far better remembered than Livingstone’s reply. (“ ‘Yes,’ Livingstone answered simply. He was relieved that the man wasn’t French.”)
Fine entertainment for adventure buffs, solidly researched and fluently told.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50451-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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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