by Caroline Van Hemert ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 12, 2019
One follows this engrossing adventure feeling as eager as the travelers to see what's around the next bend in the river, on...
A research wildlife biologist at the U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center recounts a stirring wilderness adventure set against the background of a young woman juggling family, career, and a passion for rough country.
From the Pacific rainforests of Washington state to a remote corner of the Alaskan Arctic, it was an often grueling, 4,000-mile journey by foot, skis, raft, and canoe that few would have attempted, even such experienced wilderness travelers as debut author Van Hemert and her husband, Pat. In 2012, the author, who had begun to question her devotion to science, and Pat, a home builder driven by wanderlust, embarked on an expedition that would succeed or fail on human power alone—no roads, no trails, no motors—and test the limits of their endurance on some of the harshest and most unforgiving terrain in the world. Van Hemert chronicles their journey in sharp, sometimes-harrowing detail, though not so minutely that the narrative bogs down in the exigencies of living in the wild. While she discusses their various triumphs and travails, the author fully expresses the wonder of what they saw and experienced, who they met along the way, the microcultures they encountered, and how the journey brought her back to a love of scientific inquiry (if not to a love of the laboratory). After a brief in-progress report, she opens with the couple's personal histories and motivations for undertaking the trip. What might have been perfunctory actually adds depth. For all the readers’ vicarious thrills and Van Hemert’s admirable writing, it is the author’s candor regarding her doubts and her appealing vulnerability that make this memoir so resonant.
One follows this engrossing adventure feeling as eager as the travelers to see what's around the next bend in the river, on the next island, across the next coastal passage, or over the next mountain pass.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41442-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
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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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