Worth a peek for armchair voyagers.
“Uncle” Bob Harris is a world traveler, adventurer and, quite possibly, a spy for the U.S. government.
Julianna revisits her relationship with her late father’s best friend, “Uncle” Bob Harris. Julianna suffered from a rare form of arthritis that sometimes left her bedridden. Her vibrant uncle visited the family between mysterious trips to foreign locations; the rumor was that he spied for the CIA. Yet he surprised Julianna one day with an offer to travel with him, insisting that the experiences would benefit her body and mind. While in the Sahara, Julianna asked Bob to tell her his life story. He began doling out details with every trip they took together. She learned he worked in box production—editing an industry publication, selling products and acting as a liaison between American and overseas companies. His connections led to a covert gig with the U.S. State Department, for which he acquired information about a region’s need for box production facilities. Did this mean he was really a spy? More creative nonfiction than memoir, the book captures a charming, exciting personality in Bob. Julianna articulates his tales, true or not, in an engaging way. And while some moments in the book drag, specifically regarding the box industry, readers will be relieved to know the next adventure is only a few pages away. Forays to the Middle East, across Russia on the Trans Siberian Express railroads, and up Mt. Everest read like the greatest of adventures. Though these depictions are fascinating, Julianna has neglected to relate her health problems to these experiences; clearly, Bob is an interesting guy whose story is worth telling, but readers may wonder why the author felt the need to mention Julianna’s arthritis at all if she failed to follow up on the topic. The message to live life to the fullest is still clear, regardless of physical limitations.
Worth a peek for armchair voyagers.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4697-5983-8
Page Count: 148
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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