Seemingly covering disparate topics, Baker beautifully connects them all with an incisive, clear writing style and sharp...
A Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist takes readers on a journey through the Indian subcontinent at the closing of the British Empire.
Baker (The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, 2011, etc.) narrates the stories of geologist John Auden (1903-1991) and surveyor Michael Spender (1906-1945), who both thoroughly explored this mysterious region of the world. They worked together on a survey expedition to map K2 and the surrounding Himalayas in a time before nylon tents, fleece bedrolls, and oxygen tanks. Harboring a secret desire to conquer Mount Everest, Auden diligently studied and surveyed the mountains to learn how and why the range was formed. While he, as many, did not accept the theory of continental drift, he was the first to notice the Main Central Thrust, the fault that runs the 1,500-mile length of the Himalayas. His observations and classifications of the composition and arrangement of rocks fueled countless post–World War II projects as India modernized. Spender brought his craft of photogrammetry—making measurements from photos (aerial and otherwise)—to create topographic maps. During the war, he helped define the art of photographic interpretation. With a host of interpreters working for him, he identified Nazis amassing equipment for invasions. Refreshingly, Baker doesn’t just focus on these two remarkable men. She also engagingly discusses the men and women who explored world events with art, poetry, and prose, seeing different angles and using different tools. W.H. Auden (John’s brother), Stephen Spender (Michael’s brother), Nancy Sharp (Michael’s wife), and Chris Isherwood all helped to map the cultural landscape of that era. In India, there was Sudhin Datta, a Bengali intellectual who founded Parichay, a literary journal for men of letters, and was the host of a weekly discussion group in Calcutta.
Seemingly covering disparate topics, Baker beautifully connects them all with an incisive, clear writing style and sharp descriptions of the terrain. A book for any readers curious about India after 1900.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55597-804-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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