Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

Next book

SEARCHING FOR PEKPEK

CASSOWARIES AND CONSERVATION IN THE NEW GUINEA RAINFOREST

A genuine adventure that often reads more like a report than a story.

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT

A scientist looks back at his fascinating career and offers a pointed critique of mainstream conservation organizations.

As a graduate student in tropical biology at the University of Miami, Mack decided to conduct research on cassowaries—flightless birds that live primarily in the isolated rain forests of New Guinea. He traveled to Papua New Guinea, a country with over 800 tribal groups, a massive expanse of unbroken rain forest and hardly any established research facilities. It was a good fit for someone who finds “a sure thing boring.” Mack’s memoir recounts the two decades he spent in this remote, captivating land, from his pilot study in 1987 to his abrupt exit in 2007. Chapter by chapter, he inched up the ladder of his dreams by finding a study site teeming with pekpek (the Tok Pisin word for cassowary excrement) and eventually building a field research station with the Pawai’ia tribe. Later, he and Deb Wright, his wife at the time, teamed up with the Wildlife Conservation Society and developed a program based in Goroka that trained Papua New Guinean students to become conservation professionals. He encountered hardship every step of the way—life-threatening diseases, harrowing helicopter rides, testy tribal power struggles, flash floods and flesh-eating microbes, just to name a few. Readers looking for character development or suspense won’t find much here; there’s more insight into the plants and animals Mack observed than the people around him, and most of the major plot developments are plainly stated in the chapter’s titles. What emerges, however, is a hard-earned conservation manifesto: Mack believes the only sustainable conservation practices are those that focus on “capacity building,” the training of local citizens to manage their own country’s natural resources without long-term dependence on foreign expertise. It’s a convincing outlook, but with a tone that mixes bitterness, humor and pride, Mack sullies his argument by portraying the leaders of “Big Conservation” as perpetually clueless and shortsighted. Nevertheless, the book affords readers an impressive look at what can be accomplished with dogged determination and the right partners.

A genuine adventure that often reads more like a report than a story.

Pub Date: March 11, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-9893903-0-9

Page Count: 254

Publisher: Cassowary Conservation & Publishing, LLC

Review Posted Online: April 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014

Next book

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
Next book

INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

Awards & Accolades

Likes

  • Readers Vote
  • 19


Our Verdict

  • Our Verdict
  • GET IT


Google Rating

  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating
  • google rating

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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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

Close Quickview