A lambent chronicle of wandering north and encountering an old idea brought forcibly into a new age.
“What had happened . . . to the idea of remoteness, the sense of magisterial nature embodied in the word ‘Thule’?” asks British journalist Kavenna, who went to find out.
Ultima Thule: a glazed landscape pure and haunting, a northerly myth, frozen in silence, strange and disconcerting, far and gone. Pytheas said he had been there, Pliny the Elder felt free to describe it, Strabo had nothing but scorn to heap upon the notion, the Venerable Bede figured it was Iceland. Thule was the pea under Kavenna’s mattress; she longed to seek out “the consolations of a perfect view, the tranquility of slowness.” But where was Thule? The author followed many wayward suggestions: to Norway and Shetland and Iceland, Estonia, Greenland and Spitsbergen. She is a chromatic, poised writer with an eye for evocative images. In Oslo she heard “atonal bells striking eight outside”; in the Shetlands she “found a gate singing in the wind, and an oval-shaped ruin a few feet high.” She journeyed to Iceland, where the Victorians encountered “the devil holes, the sulphur pots, the lairs of Beelzebub,” and to the Norwegian archipelago of Spitsbergen, a two-tone frieze of rock and ice. She inhaled explorers, writers and politicos—Fridtjof Nansen, Halldór Laxness and Vidkun Quisling, for starters—as she took the measure of the Thule Society (a group also concerned with racial purity) and the bleached unknowingness of the Thule Air Base, a Cold War relic in a long line of pretenders stealing a vibrant name for political purposes. For Kavenna, Thule will always be an ancient fragment of desire and unease, a play of colors on the ice, beautiful and silent.
A lambent chronicle of wandering north and encountering an old idea brought forcibly into a new age.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-670-03473-8
Page Count: 294
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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