Baker evokes strange worlds and distant times in a narrative that never fails to flow and that, in the end, is admirably...
An enlightening study of the Beat Generation’s quest for enlightenment in India.
The most prominent exemplar of the holy-fool searcher was not Jack Kerouac, who proclaimed himself a bodhisattva, or even Gary Snyder, who turned to Japan for guidance, but instead the ecstatic sensualist Allen Ginsberg. Baker (In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding, 1993, etc.), a fine storyteller, traces the moment to a New York day on which Ginsberg, gazing out the window of some anonymous apartment, sees God, or at least a god. From that moment on, though famously still interested in more earthly adventures with young men, he sought the presence of the divine. No better place for that quest than India, which, in the early 1960s, was not wholly prepared for Ginsberg’s arrival, nor the attentions of more reluctant beats such as Gregory Corso. Yet Ginsberg soon found sympathetic allies among religious but mostly nonsectarian Indians, who shared some of the American poet’s worldly interests and brought a beat sensibility to their own culture, which was thriving, especially around Bombay and Calcutta. Blessed with the ability to mix and make friends and with a Zelig-like talent for being in the right place at the right time, Ginsberg antedated the Beatles in Rishikesh by a few years. Though in love with much of what he saw—he chided Paul Bowles for having warned him away from cheap lodgings, writing, “I must say, you made it sound as if a westerner would die of rat poison if he stayed anywhere but Taj Mahal Hotel”—he was also a realist enough to see India’s suffering as well. This knowledge came to fill notebooks, and Ginsberg imported many things Indian, notably the Hare Krishna chant, to the Bay Area and Greenwich Village.
Baker evokes strange worlds and distant times in a narrative that never fails to flow and that, in the end, is admirably illuminating.Pub Date: April 14, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-158-5
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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