A paean to mechanized flying and a journal of one woman's learning experiences. It is clear from takeoff that poet Ackerman, has only one love greater than flying—the English language. She plain refuses to write a boring sentence. Oh, few of her paragraphs read like a flight through fog and some of her metaphors never leave the ground, but the reader almost always benefits from her willingness to take risks and from her laudable avoidance of clich‚. Written ostensibly to chronicle the education of a poet-pilot and to document one woman's initiation into the wonders of the sky, it is soon apparent that Ackerman's digressions, internal solos and private cross-countries are as valuable a part of the book as her rhapsodically rendered accounts of her actual air time. In fact, the exuberance of her style and voice may at first put the reader off, as Ackerman nearly overwhelms with enthusiasm and passion. Perhaps it is similar to the feeling a first-timer has when confronting the maze of instruments in an airplane's cockpit: there is something wonderful to be learned here if he or she can only get past the basics. Ackerman's writing style holds out the same promise, one that is honestly kept and demonstrally fulfilled. Uplifting, thoughtful, touching and true.
Pub Date: Aug. 29, 1985
ISBN: 068418835X
Page Count: 332
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1985
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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