A companion to Waterlog, this will hopefully bring Deakin to the attention of American readers, who will find him a kindred...
Part Walden, part Road to Oxiana: The late British natural-history writer Deakin (Waterlog: A Swimmer’s Journey Through Britain, 1999) serves up an elegant meditation on trees and why they matter.
Put it down to the Druids and the Green Man, but folks back in the mother country love all things tree-related. They like toads, moles, sheep and suchlike critters, too, whence the deserved centrality of The Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit and the Pooh quartet, among other celebrations of country living. As Deakin puts it, they like these things perhaps precisely because they have lost so much of their rural heritage in recent decades, so that “the British generally take a correspondingly greater interest in what trees and woods they still have left.” Deakin, a literate chap, adds Gerald Manley Hopkins, Henry David Thoreau and Patrick Leigh Fermor to the mix, plus the Whole Earth Catalog, under whose influence he set about on an exercise in hippie communard living back in the day. But he was no latecomer. As he writes, he comes from a long, proud tradition of forest people, with fitting names in the family tree such as Wood and Greenwood, and forebears who belonged to the woodland-anarchist tradition of Robin Hood. To trust these pages, Deakin knows how to coppice and pollard; he writes lovingly of coops and sheds, moths and cornfields, oaks and apples. Not content to remain imprisoned in his lime-tree bower, Deakin departs midway through for a tour of other lands and other trees, venturing to East Anglia, France, Australia and Central Asia. Once the game is afoot, he writes with the studied breathlessness of David Attenborough (“We threaded our way off piste through more of the termite stalactites towards the ten-foot bushes, which, sure enough, were covered in ripe black fruit the size of small olives”) and communicates that he’s having the time of his life.
A companion to Waterlog, this will hopefully bring Deakin to the attention of American readers, who will find him a kindred spirit to Annie Dillard, Wendell Berry and other celebrants of the land.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9362-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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