A vivacious study that will surely revive interest in the writings of this towering explorer and ethnographer.
Canadian author Bown (The Last Viking: The Life of Roald Amundsen, 2012, etc.) fashions a thorough, insightful biography of the fearless explorer and noted writer Knud Rasmussen (1879-1933).
Rasmussen translated his love of his native Greenland into painstaking chronicles of the Inuit culture gleaned over three decades of arduous, groundbreaking exploration. His extraordinary upbringing played a significant role in his remarkable ability to infiltrate the Inuit tribes and become a trusted scribe among them. The son of a Danish missionary who made “herculean dogsled expeditions to the farthest regions of his sprawling parsonage,” Rasmussen learned early on the local Greenlandic language (his mother’s heritage) and a love of hunting and bobsled culture. After being sent to school in Copenhagen and deciding he was not going to be an actor, he hit on journalistic writing as a profession. He made an initial inspirational trip to Lapland to chronicle the culture of the Sami people, developing the themes that would obsess him the rest of his life—namely, the vanishing of the traditional old ways “to the juggernaut of modernity,” where “tradition and myth were replaced with the soullessness of the market economy.” Beginning with the Danish Literary Expedition across northern Greenland (1903-1904), which yielded the wildly popular work People of the Polar North, Rasmussen and his trusty companion Peter Freuchen would embark over the next decades on numerous Thule Expeditions, taking them far into the recesses of Inuit tribes and producing extensive and significant records of vanishing worlds. Bown emphasizes the sheer vitality and charisma of Rasmussen, who shared his celebrity spotlight with the Inuit hunters, dog-sled drivers, and others who were key to the success of the expeditions.
A vivacious study that will surely revive interest in the writings of this towering explorer and ethnographer.Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-306-82282-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Merloyd Lawrence/Da Capo
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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