An awkward attempt to funnel a full, entertaining life into an educational reading.
A memoir of one man’s conscientious efforts to make the world a better place.
Kay’s background includes a series of successes in a variety of areas. He’s been an interpreter during World War II, a graduate student, scientist, innovator, business man, charitable donor, activist, public-interest pollster–and the list goes on as he enters his ninth decade. The author has devoted much time and money to the passionate pursuit of world peace. When not marching in rallies against nuclear proliferation, he was traveling to Russia to meet with people at the highest levels of government, including Gorbachev, in an effort to promote peaceful resolutions to the Cold War. Kay is at his best when he displays his dry wit and willingness to laugh at his younger self. His stories about his many careers are intriguing, and certainly many readers will find his desire to snuff out the potential for nuclear war admirable, but the writing lacks inspiration. The text is often bogged down in tedious detail unnecessary to the main thrust of the author’s story. For example, his attitude toward sports and professional teams is not a vital addition to the book, nor is his anecdote about who first donated money to the nuclear-freeze movement. Kay occasionally slips out of memoir mode and indulges in detailed explanations on concepts he studied and developed as a scientist. These chapters might be of interest to readers who are technically inclined, but are likely to deter others. The final chapter is the strongest–Kay draws parallels between the biological world and the social world, suggesting that humans might learn symbiosis and survival from plants, cells and the human body.
An awkward attempt to funnel a full, entertaining life into an educational reading.Pub Date: April 8, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60206-754-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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