A refreshingly pleasant addition to the journals of self-discovery, with a timely focus on ecological stewardship.
The CEO of a corporation and his family take a sabbatical from a hectic life in New York City and head to Bali to recharge and reconnect.
In his debut memoir, Feder shares an adventure many dream about. It began when he was at a career high point. His wife, Victoria, managed a thriving community center and a preschool she had founded. Their four children were attending a competitive private school. Everybody was overscheduled, living in his or her own world. They needed a break from their safe bubble. Once Feder agreed to take a temporary respite from the breathless, goal-driven pace that had begun to define him, he found himself realizing “that constantly striving to get ahead over the years slowly gnawed at a more humanistic set of values. Outwardly, I maintained a firm position, but I felt the edge had already begun to come off.” After many months of careful preparation, Feder and his family left New York in a December snowstorm and headed to Tanzania, where they spent two weeks on a safari before heading for their reprieve in Bali. The children were enrolled for the spring semester in Bali’s Green School, established by a Canadian expatriate: “The school’s mission statement talked about joy, leadership, and teaching kids to be global citizens.” Feder challenged himself physically through mountain biking and spiritually through yoga, meditation, and drawing. Although occasionally the narrative has the dispassionate tone of a genial tour guide, there are strong moments when the author reveals the excitement of unlocking a new way of experiencing the world: “My drawing opened up a new dimension of travel for me. Spending an hour or so truly observing an image and perceiving the lines, edges, shadows, and perspectives was an unimaginable luxury. I then chose to turn those perceptions into drawings because I would add something of myself to the image, an expression that was personal and unique.” The text bogs down in details of mastering the complexities of yoga exercises, but Feder’s self-deprecating humor remains charming throughout.
A refreshingly pleasant addition to the journals of self-discovery, with a timely focus on ecological stewardship.Pub Date: April 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63576-367-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Radius Book Group
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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