Slack moments aside, this memoir of travel with a family in need of change has its pleasures.
Slate editor Kois (Facing Future, 2009, etc.) looks for a little quality time with the family, finding it in adventures and misadventures around the world.
“Above all,” writes the author near the beginning, “our life as a family felt as though it were flying past in a blur of petty arguments, overworked days, exhausted nights, an inchoate longing for some kind of existence that made more sense.” The answer: Uproot. Move. Go see what the rest of the world looks like while the kids are still young. Kois and his family embarked on a journey that took them from Northern Virginia to New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, Kansas, and back again in a whirlwind year. The book doesn’t have much of a thesis, but its slightly melancholy ending might remind cinema-minded readers of the end of Bill Forsyth’s 1983 film Local Hero. There are a few set pieces and clichés but also some nicely tuned-in observations befitting a keen-eyed journalist. For example, the author writes about how in Holland, speed laws for motor vehicles are set at 30 kilometers per hour because anything more would likely doom a pedestrian or cyclist to death. So it is that people survive such collisions in Holland, which puts a nation assured of good odds on two wheels, which, thus applied to children, “helps create the kind of independence that Dutch parents prize." The America of red-state Kansas proved more fearful but not without civic virtues; refreshingly, Kois doesn’t hammer too hard on politics even though it’s clear where his views lie. Overall, the book is a minor contribution to the literature of family (and travel, for that matter), but it’s a pleasant narrative that makes few demands on readers.
Slack moments aside, this memoir of travel with a family in need of change has its pleasures.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-55262-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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