A loving depiction of a remarkable woman who charmed the world as much as it captivated her.
A longtime literary collaborator traces the life of a young British girl who became a voice for humanity.
Many have fallen under the spell cast by Jane Goodall. Peterson, who edited her two-volume autobiography (Reason For Hope, 1999; Beyond Innocence, 2001), paints his own glowing portrait here. The story begins in a seaside British home, where Valerie Jane was born, in 1933, cared for a menagerie of pets and spent her days reading Doctor Doolittle. She grew up, went to school and in 1955 got an invitation to spend several months in Africa. Her passion for animals got her introduced to anthropologist Louis Leakey, who envisioned a scientific study of chimpanzees living freely in the forest. Within a few years, the animal lover was on the edge of a crystal-blue lake surrounded by a lush emerald jungle. Day after day, Goodall dutifully headed into the forest, where her persistence eventually paid off. She developed a comfortable familiarity with the chimpanzees she studied, and her observations made her a household name. Peterson’s pacing is particularly good, and the jungle never lacks for drama: There are love affairs both animal and human, as well as struggle, death and, ultimately, triumph. Though Peterson tends to gloss over the unhappier parts of his subject’s life, much of her is exposed here. The reader sees Goodall as a disarming but determined advocate and activist who changed the lives of all who met her, whether human or beast. She adapted to her environment, but never forgot who she was. By the end, she is still young Valerie Jane, traveling the world to share her love of animals with the rest of humanity.
A loving depiction of a remarkable woman who charmed the world as much as it captivated her.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-395-85405-9
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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
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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