A warmly humane memoir.
An award-winning nonfiction writer’s account of the memorable year he spent living in the South African kingdom of Lesotho.
When McGrath’s cultural anthropologist wife, Ellen, suggested they move to Lesotho, a landlocked nation with the “second highest HIV prevalence rate on the planet,” he had no idea what Lesotho was or where it was located. Nevertheless, he embraced Ellen’s idea, and the pair soon moved to a remote eastern district of the country called Mokhotlong. While his wife researched “how families were adapting to the AIDS crisis,” the author took a job as a high school teacher. He soon befriended many of the district’s interesting inhabitants, including Nthabeleng, a 4-foot “tiny dynamo” of a woman who “sees all, hears all, knows all,” and Limpho, the beloved “hog-butchering librarian” who left Mokhotlong one day to quietly die in a hospital. A keen student of human behavior, McGrath took particular delight in observing the behaviors of the Basotho people. Total strangers held hands, people stared openly at foreigners out of curiosity and interest, and women nursed babies without shame in public. For one cycle of seasons following their arrival, the author and his wife immersed themselves in Basotho culture. In spring, they came as newcomers to a ruggedly beautiful, high-altitude land. By summer, they partook of community celebrations that included a pig-killing feast. That fall, they marveled at dinosaur prints left in ancient rock and witnessed how AIDS was leaving its own mark on the population, all while contemplating their new lives. They left in winter, forever changed by their experiences, with a profound connection to a place that had become their second home. Subtle, witty, and well-observed, McGrath’s narrative is a chronicle of spiritual growth and a memorable love letter to the remote African kingdom that stole his heart.
A warmly humane memoir.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-945814-62-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
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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