Adventuresome and enlightening brain candy for the jet set.
A devilishly witty travelogue from a globetrotting expatriate’s wife.
Keenan is quick to point out that as the wife of a peripatetic diplomat, she has indeed seen her share of foreign countries, each with its own distinctive customs and flavors—but it’s not as glamorous as one might imagine. Keenan is at the mercy of mood swings that leave her feeling privileged one minute and “just an appendage” the next, and her life abroad is both eye-opening and humorous. Here, the columnist and former fashion editor for the Sunday London Times compiles memories from 30 years spent living in places like Brussels, Trinidad, Barbados, India, Gambia and Syria as a “trailing spouse.” Alone most days with just the stewards, cooks and housekeepers for company, the author admits to sometimes being reduced to tears, yearning for the company of daughters Hester and Claudia, overcome by language barriers. Luckily, their steward, Ceesay, an Eddie Murphy look-alike, provides unintentional comic relief with his delightfully blunt mannerisms. Keenan and her Buddhist husband are polar opposites, yet they complement each other nicely throughout their travels—a long and often romantic saga that makes up the bulk of the book. From hut-camping in Kathmandu with venomous snakes and repulsive giant jumping spiders (“the size of a small saucer”) to typhoons in Nepal and crocodiles in Ethiopia, Keenan knows well the comic power of a culture-shocked stranger in a strange land. Her anecdotes and bumbling foibles can be laugh-out-loud funny, but they also afford readers moments of personal reflection. The memoir has a tendency to ramble on, but more embarrassing awkwardness always surfaces, and the laughs resume.
Adventuresome and enlightening brain candy for the jet set.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2006
ISBN: 0-7195-6726-2
Page Count: 292
Publisher: John Murray Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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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