Impossible not to cheer for Baxter’s plucky pachyderms: a saga that, even at its most improbable, engages the reader’s heart...
Final installment of Baxter’s trilogy (it previously appeared in Britain) featuring intelligent mammoths—although, unaccountably, the publishers released the first two volumes here in the wrong order (Silverhair, 1999; Longtusk, 2001). It is now the fourth millennium. The mammoth Icebones, daughter of Silverhair, wakes from prolonged suspended animation—on top of Olympus Mons, the highest mountain on Mars! Moreover, she’s at once surrounded by bewildered mammoths who, fed and nurtured by humans, have no idea how to survive now that the humans have gone. Mammoths have innate language skills, so at least the small, squat Icebones can talk with her tall, spindly, Mars-born cousins. Icebones, with her hard-won survival skills, must become Matriarch, and weld the confused group into a herd. But there’s no food and little water on the mountain, and it seems that, briefly warm and wet, Mars is already cooling and dying. The mammoths might survive in Hellas basin, the deepest crater on the planet. And so they begin an epic journey across half the globe: down the enormous mountain, past huge frozen seas, through the vast canyon of the Valles Marineris, battling thirst, cold, starvation, predators, and even each other—not all the mammoths accept Icebones’s leadership. And even if the herd attains its goal, it’s far from certain that mammoths can survive if the planet continues to cool.
Impossible not to cheer for Baxter’s plucky pachyderms: a saga that, even at its most improbable, engages the reader’s heart and mind.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-380-81899-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Eos/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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