In this terrific biography of the LeakeysLouis, Mary, and Richardscience journalist Morell manages to be exhaustive while keeping things nimble. The Leakey family first set up shop at Kikuyu Station back in 1902, when Reverend Harry Leakey (Louis's father) settled in then Kenya Colony as a missionary. Louis was born there in 1903 and by 13 was already hot on the trail of Stone Age man. It was at Olduvai, a veritable gold mine of fossils and ancient tools, that he made his reputation, and Morell vibrantly conveys the flavor of that archaeological dig: the thrill of the chase and the excitement of a find. Mary Leakey, Louis's second wife (with whom he initially had an adulterous liaison; Louis was never known for his sexual reticence), was not just along for the ride at Olduvai; she uncovered many of the most famous finds. Of their children, it was Richard who took up the torch and carried it perhaps even further than his illustrious parents. Morell employs letters, journals, interviews, and articles to provide a nearly blow-by-blow, you- were-there reportage of the Leakeys' life in Africa: their perpetual penury, their intramural clashes of personality, their extramural duelings with the larger archaeological community. Without ever descending into pyschobabble, Morell renders good character sketches of the threeLouis as an inspired charismatic with a ferocious range of curiosity; Mary as a gifted bone-digger with what might be mildly termed a crotchety edge; and Richard as a smooth, ambitious creature with a nose for both money and fossilized remains. Morell also sprinkles an extraordinary amount of graspable archaeological and paleoanthropological theory into the narrative, spiced with the rivalries and tensions that seem to beset all scholarly endeavors. Morell gives real zip to the glacially slow work of field archaeology and serves up the ``first family of anthropology'' in dramatic, erudite style. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-80192-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
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