In a sort of nouveau Dharma Bums, drifting in and out of Bay Area counterculture and the High Sierra, young Californian Duane combines a climber's journal with a memoir of the year following his graduation from Cornell. This writer hates cities and loves mountains so much that he dropped out of his junior year in Paris and headed for the PyrÇnÇes instead. Rejected by grad school, having ``failed at the Ivy League,'' he watches fraternity brothers get jobs at places like Salomon Brothers. (``Guys twenty-one years old wore the same suits as the broken-down old timers, both letting careers eat the whole middle out of their lives.'') He heads west, gets a job in a mountain-climbing equipment store in Berkeley, his hometown, hangs out with his youthful but wise parents, former 60's civil-rights activists, and cautiously, gently begins an affair with Kyla, a feminist organic gardener at U.C. Santa Cruz who worships the Goddess and wonders if she's gay. In one scene, naked in a meadow, they eat guavas while making love. Seeking some kind of logic and order to his life, Duane, under the tutelage of his father and uncle, both of whom are middle-aged and in better shape than he, sets himself the painstaking task of preparing for, and climbing, the biggest and most dangerous rock in the Sierra—El Capitan. On the granite faces of Yosemite, Duane's prose comes most alive. ``As we slid down our ropes the hues of cloud and stone on Half Dome continued to shift, light and vapor painting and repainting the wall.'' In the arenas of sport and love, he learns patience, understanding, and how to confront his fear. Lively and engaging, if sometimes too earnest and self- indulgent, this is a good graduation present for those Generation X-ers who can afford to be nonmaterialistic these days.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55597-210-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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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