Simultaneously uplifting, inspiring, and dispiriting.
An entertaining and informative trip around Alaska’s coastline, one man’s “event of a lifetime.”
Adventure writer and journalist Adams (Meet Me in Atlantis: My Quest to Find the Sunken City, 2015, etc.) returns to the successful narrative strategy he employed in his previous books, melding history and travel writing in a winning combination. Here, he follows in the footsteps of Edward H. Harriman’s 1899 expedition to northern Alaska. The Union Pacific tycoon refitted a steamship and invited a who’s who of “extraordinary gentlemen” to accompany him, including John Muir, John Burroughs, George Bird Grinnell, C. Hart Merriam, and a young photographer, Edward Curtis, “who had guided Merriam and Grinnell to safety after they’d gotten lost while hiking on Mount Rainier in 1898.” Adams journeyed alone, making his way to Bellingham, Washington, to board the Kennicott, setting out by sea, air, and land on Alaska’s 3,000-mile Marine Highway. The author is a terrific guide and an even better historian. Chapters juxtapose his and the 1899 expedition members’ experiences at each stop, from Anchorage and Haines to Nome and “Land’s End,” remote Shishmaref, located 30 miles south of the Arctic Circle on “a long sandbar, an elongated peanut two and a half miles long and less than a half mile wide at its narrow waist.” There, a resident told Adams that the “seasons have changed” and that “it’s taking longer for the ocean to freeze. Traditionally, it freezes in October. Last year it froze in January.” This environmental theme runs throughout the narrative. Alaska’s “frozen kingdom,” writes the author, is “dissolving like a popsicle in the sun.” In Gustavus (pop. 434), a golf course is “on land that had been underwater during the Harriman Expedition.” Because of “isostatic rebound,” the melting ice in Glacier Bay makes formerly depressed land rise up. Adams populates his story with hilarious tales and revealing encounters with guides, scientists, and a couple frisky brown bears.
Simultaneously uplifting, inspiring, and dispiriting.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-98510-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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