An easy-to-read, pleasurable account that will find its greatest appeal with fellow birders.
A “big year” birding adventure with a personal twist.
The attempt to identify as many species as possible in one calendar year has been the subject of numerous books since Roger Tory Peterson’s Wild America. What makes this big-year book different is the father-son bonding element. Collard (Catching Air, 2017, etc.), a marine biologist by training who has written more than 75 books for young readers, and his teenage son, Braden, a budding birding enthusiast, share a strong common interest, which makes their relationship one that many parents of teenagers will envy. The author may have omitted or softened some of the inevitable tensions or disagreements, but the picture of a teenager that emerges has the ring of truth. A proficient storyteller, Collard writes with style about their travels together in 2016 around Montana, where the author lives (Missoula), and to Arizona, Texas, and California. There are the usual disappointments of bad weather, closed refuges, broken equipment, and missed sightings as well as encounters with enthusiastic fellow birders and time spent with knowledgeable nature lovers. The author also describes an unforgettable brush with a swarm of mad bees. Overall, though, the focus is on the excitement of spotting and identifying new species. The point of a big year is to keep a list, and the longer the list, the happier the birder. Aware that big-year birders can become hung up—even unhealthily obsessed—with competing and with compiling statistics, Collard tried hard to broaden his adventure into a learning experience; for the most part, he succeeded. He and his son’s goals were modest—they weren’t competing with the pros—and the author shows the two of them willingly revising an identification when further examination reveals that their first one was wrong. For readers who are counting, end-of-chapter lists report their sightings, and an alphabetical big-year list appears at the end of the book.
An easy-to-read, pleasurable account that will find its greatest appeal with fellow birders.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68051-136-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mountaineers Books
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 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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