Millennial ennui turns into a search for meaning in an intriguing portrait of America.
A college graduate’s 11-month walking tour of America.
Following graduation from Middlebury College, 23-year-old Forsthoefel hatched a plan to leave his mother’s home in suburban Philadelphia and walk until he spent all his money or hit the Pacific Ocean, whichever came first. Guided by his literary heroes Rainer Maria Rilke, Khalil Gibran, and Walt Whitman (whose democratic spirit is a major influence here), Forsthoefel began traveling west with the bare minimum for shelter, a sign reading “Walking to Listen,” and the vague idea that his trip would be “like a graduate program in the human experience.” For the author, the impetus to walk was indefinable but urgent: “I woke up the next morning anxious to get walking again, toward what, I didn’t quite know.” Along the way, Forsthoefel confronted the “others” of society, and he remarks on race, class, and privilege. He also explains that while a student at Middlebury, he researched the concept of “coming of age” and how other cultures prepare their young to become adults. It’s not hard to see how this concept informs Forsthoefel’s trek, which was his own attempt to define his adulthood in the post-collegiate existentialist void experienced by so many millennials. However, the author’s sincerity and earnestness are tempered by his urge to “learn something” from his encounters. He refers to the people he met as his “teachers,” and he was consciously aware of his use of their experiences for his gain. (This also cost Forsthoefel his job on a fishing boat prior to his cross-country journey, when he revealed to the captain that he’d begun a blog about the experience.) The author recorded his conversations for future logging and transcribing, all a sign of his intention to use his trip for some other end, not merely the empathic experience of meeting citizens. However, Forsthoefel offers moments of genuine kinship and transcendence that buoy the narrative and make the adventure an uplifting, somewhat labored exercise in outreach.
Millennial ennui turns into a search for meaning in an intriguing portrait of America.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63286-700-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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