An invigorating blend of history and journalism informs this journey down Old Man River.
Buck walks the walk, or perhaps rows the row: As with his previous book on the Oregon Trail, he follows the path of preceding generations in the hope of seeing something of what they saw. That’s not easy in the case of the Mississippi River, which, along with one of its principal tributaries, the Ohio, is “jointly managed by the U.S. Coast Guard and the Army Corps of Engineers exclusively for the benefit of commercial barge traffic.” With those massive strings of barges, some as many as 25 containers long, clogging the river, traversing it by means of an old-fashioned wooden flatboat seems an invitation to disaster. Yet that’s just what Buck did, building his own craft in the manner of the 19th-century pioneers who saw in the river system a means of knitting far-flung territories into a nation. Building the boat was a challenge, and the author “would shortly learn that the flatboat was indeed an ideal school for acquiring a knowledge of human nature.” Buck populates his invigorating narrative with a memorable cast of characters, some people who traveled with him, some people he met along the way. The author was courtly to all of them, save a loudmouth Trumper who “considered it absolutely vital to explain to me that the ‘’nited states of ’merica’ was being ruined by ‘librals and buree-cats.’ ” Buck’s adventures alternate between nearly being swamped by massive commercial vessels and dealing with more mundane disasters; as he noted to his first mate, “Clusterfuck is our new normal.” Besides being a willing and intrepid traveler, Buck is also an able interpreter of history, and it’s clear that he’s devoured a library of Mississippiana. It all makes for an entertaining journey in the manner of William Least Heat-Moon, John McPhee, and other traveler-explainers.
For armchair-travel aficionados and frontier-history buffs, it doesn’t get much better.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0637-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
Categories: UNITED STATES | EXPEDITIONS | HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE
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A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
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The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
Categories: HISTORICAL & MILITARY | AFRICAN AMERICAN | HISTORY | UNITED STATES | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS
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SEEN & HEARD
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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