Not all of the adventures lead to insights for readers, but most will enjoy the trip nonetheless.
A mix of autobiography and research comprises this exploration of what we fear and how we fear it.
Journalist and photographer Yogis (Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer's Quest to Find Zen on the Sea, 2009) shares an anecdote about his childhood, telling how he loved doing math as a child until a failed test somehow instilled a "fear memory" so deep inside him that he has avoided math as much as possible ever since. Understanding fear—how the split-second instinctual reaction trumps cognitively understanding the risks involved and how to ameliorate the fear afterward—led Yogis to embark on what he refers to as "an obsession" with exploring a subject not often discussed. This obsession led him to experience firsthand some common fear-inducing situations, as well as personal fear-trigger circumstances, to take a closer look at his responses and learn more about universal responses. Yogis relates scientific research as naturally as a conversation with a friend—often, the book reads as though it was transcribed rather than written. The author fluidly links discussions of frontal lobes, the modern adaptations of fight or flight and negativity bias with his own experiences—e.g., his foray into some of the most dangerous surfing conditions in the world. Yogis pulls these unusually fear-inducing situations in some surprising directions.
Not all of the adventures lead to insights for readers, but most will enjoy the trip nonetheless.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60961-176-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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