Following in the footsteps of Alfred Wallace, the 19th-century naturalist who perhaps beat Darwin in formulating a theory of evolution, author/explorer Severin (The China Voyage, 1995, etc.) sails among the island groups of eastern Indonesia, assessing the differences a century and a half has made on the region’s flora and fauna. The situation is decidedly mixed, although the narrative is consistently absorbing and quite exciting. Severin commissions the building of a prahu, the same craft Wallace sailed. The crew of the appropriately named Alfred Wallace, a motley yet efficient group, jam onto the cramped, fast, and sometimes unwieldy native boat for destinations described in Wallace’s account, The Malay Archipelago. What they find is both encouraging and depressing. On several of the less developed islands, the forests and their exotic bird populations seem intact, and the islanders themselves live much the same way Wallace described, by fishing and tilling cassava fields. A few nature preserves set up by the Indonesian government are functioning well. However, these islands, once the richest on earth due to their treasure of cloves, nutmeg, and mace, now export their unreplenishable wealth of rare and exotic birds, especially the Bird of Paradise, one of the most interesting and colorful of all birds. The waters surrounding the trading ports are polluted, the coral gardens long destroyed. While this adds some gloom, most of the narrative is sprightly. Severin and crew battle squalls, pick their way through lethal coral reefs, visit vibrant marketplaces, and endure various ailments with unflagging bonhomie. Paralleling Severin’s narrative is the tale of Wallace’s sojourn among the islands; Wallace endured every conceivable ill which nature could dish out—and his notes, sent back to England, arrived suspiciously close to the time Darwin made public his treatise on evolution. As an expertly illustrated travelogue, nature book, sea tale, and biography, Severin’s work qualifies as great entertainment. (b&w and color illustrations) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7867-0518-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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