A journey through Equatorial Africa to study the fate of elephants and other wildlife produces a somber chronicle of irrevocable loss, relieved only by noted naturalist and novelist Matthiessen's lucid prose and concluding intimations of some redress. Matthiessen, a frequent traveler to Africa, began his investigation with a visit in the late 1970's to Senegal, Gambia, and the Ivory Coast, where the encroaching Sahel, unbridled hunting, and burgeoning populations had almost destroyed the elephant and wildlife population as well as the indigenous forest. As Matthiessen accompanied naturalists through the few preserves, often run-down and small, it became clear that the situation was even more grave than anticipated—``the animals are so scarce that they have no reality in daily life.'' It was a loss that went beyond conventional needs for preservation, for these animals have been the traditional totems and protectors of the clans. In 1986, Matthiessen returned to study the forest elephants of Gabon and Zaire, an area where ``a great silence'' descended after the depredations of the slave trade ended, allowing elephants to increase. But more recently, local wars and the enormous demand for ivory have ended this growth. In these equivalents of the Amazon rain forest, Matthiessen and his companions met pygmies, observed gorillas, and established that there are indeed two distinct kinds of elephants: forest and savannah, with a large intermediary hybrid group that wanders between the forest and grassland. The recent ban on ivory offers some hope of preserving the elephant, a species that, excepting fire and man, has ``more impact on habitat than any force in Africa.'' There are the usual incidents and frustrating run-ins with local bureaucrats, but Matthiessen offers much more: a moving and never-sentimental evocation of loss to both man and beast, infused with sympathy and realism. Vintage Matthiessen.
Pub Date: July 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-679-40021-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1991
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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