Occasionally predictable, often lyrical, always intriguing. (1 map, not seen)
Novelist, biographer, and travel-writer Morris (Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere, p. 1006, etc.) describes her rustic Welsh home and endeavors to define and celebrate Welsh history, geography, personalities, and Weltanschauung.
Morris has lived for years in what was once a stone stable in a remote area of the remote principality of Wales. She and her partner Elizabeth (the woman Morris married years ago when she was James Morris) converted the building into a cozy home cum library that houses some 8,000 volumes and provides Morris with the resources for her writing and the stability she craves. She calls the house Trefan Morys (partly for the name of the estate to which the building once belonged, partly for the Welsh spelling of her surname). In four swift chapters, Morris composes a love-letter to Wales and to the people who live there—and, of course, to her own home. She writes passionately about the rugged landscape and its sturdy inhabitants and rues the steady incursions of “the dross of television and advertising, drugs, crime, general dumbing-down and sheer ordinariness.” She celebrates the centrality of the kitchen in Welsh homes and culture and praises her neighbors for their reliability and tolerance (she says that they simply pretend her 1972 sex-change operation never happened). Morris teaches us about the meaning of traditional Welsh symbols (the red dragon), about the significance of historical figures (Lloyd George pops in and out like an indecisive guest), and even speculates that America’s Mandan Indians have Welsh ancestry. She does not miss many opportunities to credit the Welsh—but she does miss two: She mentions Lawrence of Arabia without noting he was born in Wales and tells us a bit about Porthmadog without commenting on the nearby Great Embankment that enthralled Percy Bysshe Shelley. Morris is at her best when she examines how Wales has grounded her writing and has at the same time helped her appreciate the mysteries and marvels of the world.
Occasionally predictable, often lyrical, always intriguing. (1 map, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7922-6523-8
Page Count: 168
Publisher: National Geographic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
IN THE NEWS
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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