A first-rate biographical portrait that also deserves accolades for its insights into the minds of adventure-seeking...
A biography of war correspondent Tim Hetherington (1970–2011), who died during a firefight in Libya while documenting the revolution there.
Huffman (Sultana: Surviving the Civil War, Prison, and the Worst Maritime Disaster in American History, 2009, etc.) recounts the career arc of British-born and -educated Hetherington while simultaneously providing insights into the mentality of war photographers during the past century. Hetherington seemed to win trust wherever he traveled and with whomever he collaborated professionally. For the most part, he did not parachute into war zones to shoot potentially prizewinning photographs and then depart quickly. Instead, he remained to document long-term problems as well as personally assist the victims of war. That characteristic became evident most prominently in the West African nation of Liberia, where Hetherington returned year after year to track war criminals and solidify relationships with rebel leaders. To casual observers, Hetherington seemed fearless, but to those who knew him well, he admitted to being frightened in a variety of dangerous situations. In the words of Sebastian Junger, Hetherington was a "bright spirit drawn to dark places." Huffman also chronicles the Hetherington-Junger collaboration on the documentary film Restrepo, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Like so much of Hetherington's other visual projects, Restrepo delved deeply into the relationship between young men and war. Though he could have settled in England or the United States or other relatively peaceful locales after making his mark as an artistic war photographer, Hetherington chose to continue to travel to dangerous locales, worrying his family and friends while also assuaging their concerns with his sunny nature.
A first-rate biographical portrait that also deserves accolades for its insights into the minds of adventure-seeking photographers.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0802120908
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
