Andrew’s intentions are beyond reproach, but his tendency to preach his lessons learned without allowing readers to...
Andrew’s memoir of time spent as an independent aid worker in earthquake-stricken Haiti details the red tape faced by large aid organizations.
In his straightforward prose, Andrew insightfully compares the conundrum of modern disaster response to the physics of large wheels and small wheels: “A large wheel [aid organization], due to its size and inertia, cannot accelerate as quickly as a small one.” Without experience or training, Andrew, a photography teacher, goes to Haiti to help get the wheels turning. In bite-size, easy to digest chapters, he offers an inside look at large-scale emergency responses, including a look at the “Disaster Tourist”—those well-intentioned but burdensome thrill-seekers who venture to disaster areas with no means of sustaining themselves, let alone others. While emergency supplies are tied up in depots, tech savvy Andrew uses his iPhone to map GPS coordinates of local orphanages and, with his Haitian-American friend Mathieu, finds creative ways of obtaining and delivering food, water filtration systems and routes to deliver diapers via Tap Tap (rickety Haitian taxis). Unfortunately, Andrew lingers on the logistics of his adventure, such as the difficulties of charging his cellphone, while barely touching on his personal impressions of post-quake Haiti. In his first drive through leveled Port-au-Prince, he briefly compares the city to Mogadishu in the movie Black Hawk Down; this metaphorical mode of description keeps the reader at a remove, rather than walking beside Andrew through what is documented to have been utter chaos and destruction. Andrew mostly fails to describe the traumatized Haitian people, instead making broad statements that create a feeling of us versus them. “Many Haitians know that they can make more money begging and scamming than they can by honest hard work,” he writes without providing much evidence. His account stays on the surface: “orphans” remain a concept, “aid” is a nicety and Andrew, as a character in this memoir, is a good guy, rather than the remarkably brave man who traveled to an unfamiliar country to help the devastated people rebuild and survive.
Andrew’s intentions are beyond reproach, but his tendency to preach his lessons learned without allowing readers to experience the learning alongside him makes the memoir less effective and memorable than if he were to detail in more depth the recovery he helped advance.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0983830009
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Maven Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 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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