A vibrant, honest, and poetic account of how two years of solitude surrounded by nature changed a man forever.
How losing eyesight in one eye made a man see more clearly.
Following a freak accident that left him without sight in one eye, the world Axelrod had envisioned for himself after graduating from Harvard suddenly didn’t seem to matter. Nothing felt concrete—not the world around him, his future plans, or even his own physical sense of being. A year in Italy and two cross-country trips still left him searching for meaning. He retreated to a small cabin deep in the woods of Vermont, a place far enough away from the noise of the world that he could hear himself think. Time slowed down to a snail’s pace as he wandered the forests on snowshoes, through the deep muck of mud season and the intense green of summer. Axelrod lyrically captures the essence of nature as he ponders his own self-worth and purpose in life. After his first winter, when summer returned, “the green was a revelation, a prodigal son—a color that had once existed, gone missing in the snows and miraculously returned. It opened itself through the hazed meadows, through the blue-green hills, through the reflections in the pewter green ponds; it deepened the blue in the pines, gilded the light off the streams, and relented only towards dusk, yielding to the slow antics of the fireflies, to the stars overhead….” By reflecting on the scenery around him and examining memories of his childhood, his school friends, and a special girl he knew in Italy, Axelrod slowly gained a deeper understanding of what it means to be alive. In his first book, the author pushes beyond the boundaries and safety nets of the modern world and opens a doorway to feelings and experiences many long for but never encounter. His writing is a balm for world-weary souls.
A vibrant, honest, and poetic account of how two years of solitude surrounded by nature changed a man forever.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8070-7546-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
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
SEEN & HEARD
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