Fine entertainment for adventure buffs, solidly researched and fluently told.
An action-packed recounting of one of the most famous incidents in the history of exploration.
Until well into the 19th century, European geography textbooks portrayed central Africa as a vast, uncharted wasteland, almost certainly a graveyard for any outsider unwise enough to enter it. The Scottish explorer David Livingstone almost single-handedly rewrote the record with his travels between 1841 and 1863, when “he saw for himself that Africa’s interior was a marvelous mosaic of highlands, light woodlands, tropical rain forest, plateaus, mountain ranges, coastal wetlands, river deltas, deserts, and thick forests.” Through Livingstone’s expedition reports, armchair travelers were able to gain knowledge of the 20 million or so tribal people who lived in this huge area and of their “hidden civilizations,” while would-be colonizers searched through Livingstone’s pages to determine where to land their invasion forces. All well and good, until, in the late 1860s, Livingstone and a large entourage disappeared somewhere between Zanzibar and Lake Tanganyika while poking around for the source of the Nile. Enter New York Herald correspondent Henry Morton Stanley, who, “charging through life with a massive chip on his shoulder,” as explorer and popular historian Dugard (Farther Than Any Man, 2001, etc.) writes, was no mean adventurer himself. Braving disease, difficult terrain, and all manner of deprivation, Stanley toddled around southeastern Africa for three years on Livingstone’s trail, despairing of ever finding the senior explorer: “The Apostle of Africa is always on my mind. And as day after day passes without starting to find him, I find myself subject to fits of depression. Indeed, I have many things to depress me.” In one of the first great instances of a wag-the-dog story, Stanley’s quest became more famous than Livingstone’s, with the words he uttered on finally encountering the Scotsman—“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”—being far better remembered than Livingstone’s reply. (“ ‘Yes,’ Livingstone answered simply. He was relieved that the man wasn’t French.”)
Fine entertainment for adventure buffs, solidly researched and fluently told.Pub Date: May 6, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50451-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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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