Absolutely delightful slices of Americana from Hubbell (Broadsides from the Other Orders, 1993, etc.). Known as a crackerjack natural historian, Hubbell here dons a journalist's garb to file these wry reports (the title comes from the New Yorker department, ``Our Far-Flung Correspondents,'' where most of these pieces first appeared). She puts in a lot of miles behind the wheel to discover the best pies to be found along the nation's highways. She researches the folk history of Hopping John, that tasty dish of black-eyed peas and rice often served as a New Year's ritual. She attends an annual get-together of magicians in Colon, Mich., where ``quick hands and sly diversions'' can be found on every street corner, at any hour. There are fleeting sketches on delivering honey in New York City (Hubbell tends an apiary in the Ozarks), the National Bowling Hall of Fame, the vexing street layout of Boston. Two of the longer articles are among the best in the collection. The first is a brightly amusing look at the tabloid Weekly World News, newspapering at its ``absurdist, post-postmodern limits,'' where the writers collect big paychecks, as the editor confesses, ``because we are, in effect, asking them to end their careers . . . We are the French Foreign Legion of Journalism.'' The other is a report from an earthquake watch: It had been predicted that New Madrid, Mo., would be hammered by a mighty trembler on December 3, 1990. Hubbell burrows into the suspect terrain of earthquake forecasting, mining it for humor, giving a tweak to self-important scientists (December 3 passed uneventfully in New Madrid). All the stories are smooth as cream, droll, strange subjects turned fascinating, with the clarity and simplicity of Robert Frost. Hubbell at her clever, entertaining best. (photos not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42833-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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