Readers won’t accuse the author of sugarcoating her experiences, and if the narrative sometimes seems to bog down in...
In 2012, sick of her job and uncertain about her marriage, Dinan (Life on Fire: A Step-By-Step Guide to Living Your Dreams, 2013, etc.) quit work and persuaded her reluctant husband to sell their house and other belongings and take off for more than two years to travel around the world.
Along with them went the envelope of the title, which contained $1,000 handed to them by Dinan’s former boss, with the instruction that the money was to be given away during the trip. She attached three provisos: “Don’t over think it”; “Share your experiences (…if you want to)”; and “Don’t feel pressured to give it all away.” The first goal proved easier said than done; the second the author accomplishes in this book. At first waffling about whether she would seem condescending or culturally insensitive, she gradually began to feel comfortable with distributing the cash to a school where they volunteered in Ecuador, a rickshaw driver in India, a dog shelter, a Nepalese holy woman, and the owners of a turtle sanctuary in Bali. If the yellow envelope provides one strand unifying the book, Dinan’s marital troubles form the other. Readers looking for insight into the locales through which the author traveled instead receive sometimes-repetitive descriptions of quarrels in which the author blames her husband for her unhappiness and he refuses to take the blame. The two separated temporarily, with the author climbing “into a rickshaw with two women I’d never met before to drive the length of India on some of the world’s deadliest roads.” Overall, Dinan narrates a memorable adventure even if she spends a good deal of time brooding about her marriage.
Readers won’t accuse the author of sugarcoating her experiences, and if the narrative sometimes seems to bog down in self-analysis, it’s likely an accurate account of her interior life on the road.Pub Date: April 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4926-3538-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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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