An earnest and well-intended effort but an outline for an adventure story more than that story itself.
A brief debut book about a young, Peruvian-born geologist’s adventures in the Amazon.
Ruzo begins with an interesting premise: his grandfather had filled him with boyhood tales of an Amazonian river so hot that it boils. Now, decades and degrees later, he sets out to find it, mindful of his grandfather’s valediction: “But remember: the jungle keeps her secrets well, and she is not afraid to keep those who come after them.” Against the thought of a river with such turbulent properties, the author found numerous forces arrayed against him, not least establishment science, whose representatives scoff at the thought that the relatively stable geothermal region of the Amazon might conceal a boiling river. It did not help that grandpa was by then suffering from dementia and that the whole enterprise was seeming more and more legendary. Still, Ruzo pressed on, and he discovered that the story involved numerous players: anthropologists, shamans, bureaucrats, indigenous peoples who want more than anything to be left alone, oil explorers for whom a boiling river might be anathema, since it could well boil away any petroleum tucked away below the surface. The story is a promising one, but it has too many moving parts to be neatly contained in so short a space, particularly when it gets to the heart of the matter: how the jungle, once explored, is almost certainly doomed to development. No one after Redmond O’Hanlon has ever gone to the Amazon thinking it would be easy, but Ruzo too often slips into vague mysticism just at the moment his narrative should take on a hard edge: “his river challenges what we think we know”; “There is so much hidden in the world, occulted in the everyday—both in the unknown and in what we think we understand.”
An earnest and well-intended effort but an outline for an adventure story more than that story itself.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1947-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: TED/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
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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