One needs to be in the mood for lyrical lamentation, but Kingsnorth’s is a voice worth listening to.
Environmentalist and historical novelist Kingsnorth (Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays, 2017, etc.) chronicles his efforts to get back to the land.
A few years back, the author “had a plan”: to get out of urbanized England, cross a just-big-enough sea to Ireland, and return to nature, schooling the kids at home, growing food, drawing water from a well—the whole rural ideal as celebrated by Yeats and company. The house he found, not far from the River Shannon, wasn’t quite the stuff of romantic idyll, more a concrete bunker—concrete being the dream of Irish folk “escaping just as soon as they could from the tiny, picturesque, damp, cramped, whitewash-and-thatch cottages” of the postcards. There was no end to the work, but the work was worth it if it meant escaping from The Machine—besides, as Kingsnorth writes, “art that doesn’t come from pain is just entertainment.” Much pain ensued as the author wrestled with the big questions: If the world is coming to an end, is it worth writing? Why write, anyway? “Am I trying to direct your thoughts here, or mine?” he wonders, agonizing about the meaning of it all, adding later that he feels unmoored in a world that has no culture but plenty of civilization, “and they are not the same thing." A little angst goes a long way, and it doesn’t help when Zen koans get mixed into the picture: If you don’t exist, are you really writing? In the end, a book that begins with the promise of adventure turns into a kind of journal of pondering and meditation, which is not at all a bad thing—think Alan Watts’ Cloud-Hidden. One wishes for a little of the sinew of Roger Deakins’ like-minded book Waterlog, but spiritual seekers with a mind to leave the workaday world will find that there’s plenty to think about as Kingsnorth works his way through his many questions.
One needs to be in the mood for lyrical lamentation, but Kingsnorth’s is a voice worth listening to.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-937512-85-9
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
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 2025 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.
