A light, travel-going pleasure. (Line drawings throughout)
A rangy gathering of travel pieces without airs.
Winner of a Pulitzer Prize for her feature writing at the Baltimore Sun, Steinbach (Without Reservations, 2000) claims modest intentions. “I wanted to study things that interested me in places that I found interesting,” she writes, to “offer a story about what I set out to learn and what I came back knowing.” The writer doesn’t expect her journeys to be travail-free, but she does like to travel in a measure of comfort, so her experiences need to be engaging enough to convince the next editor to finance her next freelance fancy. And they are: Steinbach is either a good faker, or she’s having the time of her life. She has serendipity on her side, too; she might be flummoxed in looking for a bonsai garden off a medieval street in Florence, but then she stumbles upon a rare opportunity to enter a private palazzo, which was “like opening a plain cardboard box and finding a Fabergé egg inside.” The author observes the architecture of Havana, takes a writing workshop in the Czech Republic, learns the Wakayagi style of dance in Kyoto, and studies French cooking at the Ritz, but these adventures often simply provide backgrounds for the people she meets; Steinbach has the humility to know a guide worth listening to. She basks in simple delights: “I bought a huge cup of pistachio gelato and sat eating it in the dappled shade.” Readers will admire her optimism (she carried a tube of 32 SPF sunscreen on a visit to Scotland) and enjoy her goofy humor as she describes rams—“the Scottish ones, not the Los Angeles ones”—stirring at the sight of her red windbreaker, while she walks slowly, “hoping that the color red did not have the same effect on rams as it does on bulls in Pamplona.”
A light, travel-going pleasure. (Line drawings throughout)Pub Date: April 13, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-50441-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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