Anka Muhlstein, known for her biographies of Queen Victoria and James Rothschild (not reviewed), here traces the life of Robert Cavalier de La Salle, early French explorer of the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and Texas and founder of Louisiana. She paints a pretty gripping picture of 17th-century Canada, with its tension between brawling, murderous Montreal, populated by coureurs de bois (backwoodsmen) and drunken Indians, and sober Quebec, with its farmers and administrators. We see the forests teeming with horseflies and edible ants, Iroquois war bands slaughtering Illinois villages—landscapes (to the French) terrifying, strange, and irresistible. Made owner of the land around a primitive fort called Frontenac on Lake Ontario in 1675, La Salle enriched himself via the beaver trade and mounted grueling voyages across the frozen wastes with a lifelong Indian guide, Nika. La Salle was unique among early European explorers by virtue of his intimacy with the native people, whose language he spoke. Muhlstein tries to convey something of the absurdity and unease that characterized most contacts between Europeans and Indians but is always constrained by the anecdotal nature of her enterprise. She manages simply to show La Salle's own shrewd humanity. But visionary as he was and probably, at times, half-insane, his fantastical courage and endurance could not cope with the complexity of large-scale official operations, and when he was finally commissioned by Louis XIV in 1687 to found a settlement in the territory that was not yet called Louisiana, the expedition ended in devastation and mutiny. Muhlstein's book is simply and graphically written, geared to the general reader who wants to feel the raw barbarity of frontier life rather than wade through the socioeconomic intricacies of colonial history. This makes the narrative accessible and vivid, though a surprising absence of maps makes the geographical meanderings somewhat hard to follow. Perhaps it is erroneously assumed that contemporary readers know their country as well as La Salle did.
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55970-219-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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