A call to action leavened by Chaplin's recollections of a long-gone way of life, when his parents were part of the Duke of...
When Chaplin (Research Associate/Academy of Natural Sciences; Dark Wind: A Survivor's Tale of Love and Loss, 1999, etc.) was invited to accompany an expedition to the Bahamas to see the coral reefs, he was overjoyed at the chance to relive boyhood memories.
In 2003, the author received a call from an associate curator at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, where his father's papers were archived, and was offered a chance to return to the idyllic scenes of his childhood. He had grown up on an island in the Bahamas that subsequently became the location of Paradise Beach and a magnet for tourists. Chaplin’s father was the author of the “771-page definitive work” Fishes of the Bahamas, and Chaplin had accompanied his father on many of his collecting trips. His memories would be invaluable for a planned 50-year retrospective on the state of the reefs and the fish they housed, she informed him. “We aim to go back to the original sites to make our own collections,” the ANS representative told him,” and you are the only person alive who knows exactly where they are.” The author, an advocate of sea conservation, put aside his own writing to join the project. During that trip and subsequent follow-ups, it was established that despite the effects of “[g]lobal warming, disease, bleaching, pollution, rampant algae, hurricanes, overfishing and overdiving,” which have caused severe coral degeneration and a reduction in the number of fish that populated them, species biodiversity is still intact. Nonetheless, he warns, unless measures are taken to reverse the degradation of the reefs, the “world's most diverse ecosystem will have been destroyed.”
A call to action leavened by Chaplin's recollections of a long-gone way of life, when his parents were part of the Duke of Windsor's social set on the Bahamas and he was a young boy sharing in his father's adventures at sea.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61145-895-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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