Not for readers easily frustrated with wandering thoughts, but a solid introduction to the world of volunteer tourism and a...
A travel memoir, volunteer-style.
After the death of his father, Budd confronted the age-old question about life’s purpose. With no sufficient answers, he volunteered to help with hurricane relief in New Orleans. What started as a work-sponsored week of helping out morphed into a full-fledged journey to find himself by traveling the world as a volunteer. But volunteer tourism brought a whole new set of questions—e.g., how helpful can he really be in two weeks and whether these trips make him a better person or a worse one. “My renewed quest to be a better person began with my being a selfish jerk,” he writes. Though he’s often an unsympathetic narrator, his honesty helps readers accept the flaw and keeps him relatable. Each of six trips—New Orleans, Costa Rica, China, Ecuador, Palestine and Kenya—makes up a section of the book, with vivid details about his experience in each place delivered through vignette-like memories of certain days and moments. Travelers will recognize the mish-mash of memories that accompany trips like these, but the narrative occasionally feels like an unedited journal. Readers may wonder when they’ll find their way back to the narrative thread, but they will still enjoy the journey. Ultimately, Budd comes to his conclusions about life quietly, with little of the fanfare common in memoirs. For much of the story this works well, but questions will linger over his relationship with his wife and his plans for future volunteer trips.
Not for readers easily frustrated with wandering thoughts, but a solid introduction to the world of volunteer tourism and a pleasant diversion for those who don’t mind a winding road.Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-194646-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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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