Hilary honors her father and celebrates her family legacy with this collection of fantastic hunting stories.
Hemingway and Lindsay (Dreamland, 1998) carry the Hemingway traditions of hunting, family, and storytelling into the new millennium.
After her mother’s death in 1997, Hilary, the daughter of Ernest’s younger brother Leicester, inherits an audiocassette. On the tape is a recording of a fireside storytelling session given by Leicester, who had committed suicide 15 years earlier. Hilary transcribes these tales she has never heard before, weaving them with the chatter of his fireside companions and with her own feelings, and the result is a book that rejoices in the simple beauty of a story. A huntsman and writer like his brother, Leicester describes adventures that he and Ernest experienced around the globe—with tales of nighttime crocodile hunts and slim escapes from stone-throwing baboons. Together, Leicester and his brother—often his savior—make a dynamic duo, and his tales are awesome, admirable, and a bit incredible. The pair escapes vicious packs of cannibal dogs, kills a king cobra, captures wild ostriches in Africa, and slays a kimodo dragon in the Far East. Or do they? As Hilary, Lindsay, and their daughters listen to the recording, they just can’t decide whether these are true stories or tall tales. Here, the story becomes a personal and touching one as well. Leicester Hemingway chose “the family exit” rather than suffer a double amputation made necessary by his diabetes. Hearing her father’s stories helps Hilary finally mourn his loss and gain a new perspective on her family tradition.
Hilary honors her father and celebrates her family legacy with this collection of fantastic hunting stories.Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-57322-159-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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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