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TREASURE ISLANDS

SAILING THE SOUTH SEAS IN THE WAKE OF FANNY AND ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Pretty pictures and map sketches help make this a dreamy, empowering retirement fantasy.

Psychologist and former actress Stephenson (Billy, 2002, etc.) leaves her glamorous L.A. life for a literary sail in the South Seas.

The author was ready for adventure after 20 years of pursuing a career and taking care of her children. She had been reading about Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson’s late-19th-century voyages among the South Seas islands in search of a salubrious climate for Robert’s ailing health. He suffered from tuberculosis and had been a semi-invalid most of his life. A divorcée 11 years her husband’s senior, Fanny was unflaggingly resourceful, and her spirit of adventure inspired Stephenson to make her own mid-life voyage. She procured a 112-foot Florida sloop, renamed it Takapuna after her New Zealand birthplace and refitted it with all the modern trimmings. She took a crash course in sailing, though she also took the precaution of hiring a professional captain and crew, and learned to handle guns in case of attack by pirates. (Yes, they still exist, though now they’re “entirely unromantic scoundrels with balaclavas in lieu of eyepatches.”) And off she went, with transient family members and friends on board, just as hurricane season was getting underway. From Florida they sailed around Cuba to Panama, the Galápagos and on to the various clusters of South Seas islands from the Marquesas to the Marshalls. The trip logged 19,000 nautical miles in nine months, tracking the Stevensons’ long-ago, pioneering extended stays among the Samoans and other tribes they warmly befriended. Accompanying Stephenson’s cheery chronicle are excerpts from diaries and letters chronicling her predecessors’ trip. “In some of these islands . . . it was, a little while ago, a dangerous possession to own a good set of teeth, as many people were murdered for them,” writes Fanny in one of the many nifty passages illuminating the area’s archaeology and history. The literary connection is tenuous, but Stephenson’s you-go-girl tone is earnest and endearing.

Pretty pictures and map sketches help make this a dreamy, empowering retirement fantasy.

Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-7553-1285-6

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Headline

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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