A colorful, occasionally shocking fish-out-of-water memoir.
Vigorous recollections of a youth spent among “profoundly fringy” adults “in the middle of nowhere.”
Scott moved with her idiosyncratic parents from New Zealand to Botswana in 1987, when she was almost seven years old. In minute detail, she sketches the landscape, the people she encountered and the innumerable problems that beset her family. She paints her wanderlust-stricken parents as singular human beings with a deep desire to avoid mundanity at any cost. Her father was “an accidental doctor”: Cape Town University in his native South Africa didn’t offer courses in his preferred field, veterinary medicine, so he had to settle for ministering to human beings. His wife, who grew up in Botswana, shared his belief in alternative medicine and home schooling. Together they roved from London to Cape Town to Auckland before settling with their three children in Botswana. Right next door was inimitable Grandpa Ivor, a World War II veteran of the South African Air Force, pressed into service to fly his son to the area’s remote bush clinics until Dad got a pilot’s license. Granny Joan and Grandpa Terry, Mum’s parents, also played key roles in the author’s life. Following some brief passages explaining her parents’ globetrotting exploits, Scott unleashes astonishing stories about her Botswana childhood: Their first residence was a dilapidated cowshed; the cow died from eating plastic bags; her dad sometimes drank his own urine, etc. After the family moved to their own farm in the early ’90s, home schooling gave way to a conventional education, which the author describes as “boring.” (It would be, compared to her family.) The book’s most moving passages delineate her tireless father’s heroic adventures as an ill-equipped doctor. They range from an extraordinary tale about a man who somehow inserted a ten-centimeter-long snake’s tail into his penis to accounts of the author’s mercurial, ceaselessly inventive work with AIDS patients.
A colorful, occasionally shocking fish-out-of-water memoir.Pub Date: April 10, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59420-159-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2008
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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