A sumptuous edition of a masterpiece that will captivate both youngsters and older fans interested in the history and lore...
The classic tale of pirates and their buried loot is enriched with explanatory footnotes, diagrams and illustrations in this fascinating annotated edition.
First published in 1883, Stevenson’s Treasure Island narrates the adventures of Jim Hawkins, an English teenager who in the 1750s discovers a map to a fabulous pirate treasure buried on a desert island; the ensuing voyage embroils him in a mutiny, fierce musket-and-cutlass fights and a twisty relationship with the pirate Long John Silver, a charismatic figure of noble courage and dastardly treachery. Featuring taut suspense, brisk action, an iconic coming-of-age theme and colorful characters, Treasure Island became the template for later genre pieces such as Pirates of the Caribbean. Barker-Benfield’s engaging introduction and comprehensive margin notes and sidebars explain many of the story’s details to an audience less familiar with age-of-sail conventions. Much of the narrative hinges on the handling of sailing ships, and he provides detailed, interesting accounts of their construction, rigging, navigation, protocols and jargon, which help explicate important plot points. He also delves into the evolving culture of the early-modern Atlantic-Caribbean region and the history, lifestyles and indispensable accouterments of pirates: Silver’s loquacious parrot is probably an African gray, we learn, while the refrain “yo ho ho, and a bottle of rum” prompts a disquisition on that beverage’s production and neurological effects. Intriguing conundrums and inconsistencies in the text are teased out; latitude and longitude figures put Treasure Island at one of four improbably cold locales, the author notes, while Silver’s life history makes his claimed age of 50 years a tad optimistic. Throughout, Barker-Benfield’s notes adroitly translate the richer flights of buccaneer lingo into respectable English. (“I’m a poor old hulk on a lee shore” is a pirate’s “dramatic way of saying he is nearing the end of his life.”) There are also detailed maps of the Caribbean, reproductions of portraits of real-life pirates and sea captains and meticulously detailed diagrams of ships, cannons and nautical equipment; these, along with Rhead’s atmospheric drawings of scenes from the story, add an exquisite visual dimension to the original text.
A sumptuous edition of a masterpiece that will captivate both youngsters and older fans interested in the history and lore underpinning Stevenson’s yarn.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1937075019
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Fine & Kahn
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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