Intelligently written but overly timid.
A single mother and her teenage son navigate life and culture in South Asia.
Within days of her sojourn to Sri Lanka in 2001, American-born Barker was met with immense sympathy for her homeland and its citizens—she had arrived just three weeks after 9/11. Feeling the need for a change of pace, Barker sought out teaching assignments and was commissioned to teach 19th- and 20th-century Russian literature to Sri Lankan university students. Her own cultural education of the region began almost immediately. With son Noah in tow, the author settled in the religious town of Kandy, drawing much attention as the “white lady tourist.” “Thirteen time zones removed” from her home base, the author immersed herself in the area’s customs and traditions, noting special holidays, frequent power outages and wet/dry seasons. The conditions of their ramshackle house included face-offs with ant colonies, geckos, spiders, monkeys, mosquitoes and ravenous rats. Though he’d acclimated adequately to the terrain, Barker constantly fretted about Noah, knowing that she “uprooted him from everything that grounded him.” As the center of Buddhist culture on the island, Barker notes that Kandy is full of opportunities for personal prayer and serenity, but she also devotes equal time to the region’s great history of civil unrest, the deadly war games that are downplayed in the media to stabilize tourism and the race, language and religious conflicts that have plagued Sri Lanka for decades. Though Barker reports firsthand on the devastation of the 2004 tsunami, her travels are conservatively tepid in comparison to other like-minded travelogues.
Intelligently written but overly timid.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0061-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2009
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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