A slightly better blend of Scoop and Dispatches than many memoirs by foreign correspondents. While in graduate school, and drawn by the idea of travel and adventure, Cockburn (Dangerous Liaison, 1991, etc.), now a contributing editor to Vanity Fair, joined the international bureau of NBC News. Still in her early 20s, it wasn't long before she was up to her neck in wars and disasters. Television news, especially international reporting, was still a macho fraternity, and Cockburn found herself in the uncomfortable but inspiriting role of pioneer. From Cambodia to Afghanistan, from Somalia to the Gulf War, usually behind the camera in the essential but undervalued role of producer, she has covered some of the last two decades' hottest spots. Along the way, she won a shelfful of prestigious awards and found time to have three children without most of the compromises faced by working women. For example, six months pregnant, she descended into the maelstrom of Somalia, her expanded stomach covered by an extra-large bullet-proof vest (until she discovered that Somali gunmen made a sport of testing the vests by deliberately shooting at their wearers). Cockburn never stayed very long in one place, jumping from story to story, six weeks here, a month there, just enough time to dig up a few scoops, work a new angle on an old story, and set up interviews and camera angles for the dancing-bear correspondent from New York who'd fly in for a few days to front her hard work. Because she's never in one place long enough to appreciate its true intricacies and shadings, much of her reportage here feels like intelligent tourism. She also has an off-putting flair for self-dramatization, making the moments of real danger seem oddly flat. Though the book is well crafted and full of incident, very little of it lingers long in memory. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-48319-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1998
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
