A book that will make readers want to pack their bags and catch the first flight to somewhere far away.
A set of rules for life, by way of a delightful travel narrative.
Jensen (How to Recruit, Select, Induct and Retain the Very Best Teachers, 1987, etc.) and her late husband, World War II veteran Rudy, had diametrically opposite personalities, but their combination makes for excellent stories. Her memoir highlights her husband’s list of travel rules, and over the course of their adventures, he taught her how to apply them to all things in life. The tales can be hilarious or heartbreaking, but all highlight “Rule #11”: “Relax. Some kind stranger will appear.” Throughout, the author highlights Rudy’s adventuresome spirit and absolute optimism as they journeyed to Scotland, Mexico, Egypt, Indonesia, and elsewhere. The stories don’t necessarily teach readers very much about the places they visited but rather tell how to live life to the fullest. “We don’t travel to have comfort...we can have comfort at home,” Jensen writes; traveling, according to Rudy, is for learning about new cultures, and to do that, you must “ride with locals, not tourists.” In Oaxaca, for example, the Jensens were swept up in a crowd headed to celebrate Holy Thursday. They would have missed the opportunity to participate in the ceremony if they’d gone to the recommended tourist destinations—and indeed, Jensen looked up “to see tourists in the two restaurants above us…straining to see, to understand what has happened on the streets below. I see what they had missed.” Other stories are laugh-out-loud funny, as when the couple decides between two dangerous modes of transportation in Puerto Escondido. When in Egypt, the Jensens faced a heartbreaking experience, yet it was one that also showed the generosity of the people in the community. Not a lot of time is spent at any given location in each section; instead, the author takes readers to many places, briefly but vividly describing each. In this way, the author shows how Rudy’s Rules applied to a wide variety of scenarios.
A book that will make readers want to pack their bags and catch the first flight to somewhere far away.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-322-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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