Readers with hectic lives may find the pace a bit slow, but the poetry in Badkhen’s prose demands that readers slow down and...
A journalist records her impressions of living with a group of nomads as they travel with their herds of cows back and forth across Mali.
Badkhen, who was born in Russia and has often written from war zones (The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village, 2013, etc.), embedded herself with a Fulani family in West Africa whose members are still walking with their cows as their ancestors did thousands of years ago. On her journey, the author shared their lives, sleeping on a plastic tarp on the ground (sometimes with a child or a goat curled up next to her), cooking over a manure fire, eating millet and fish paste, churning buttermilk, bathing in a river, and learning their language. The measured pace of Fulani life, basically unchanged for millennia, served as a kind of balm for Badkhen, who was recovering from a recently ended, unhappy love affair. The Fulani cannot read the printed word, but they can read the sky, they know the seasons, and they cherish their cows. They told the author their stories and their myths, and she told them about the Big Bang and the long-ago migration of humans out of Africa. In lyrical and evocative prose, Badkhen writes of the beauty of the land and the sky and the grace and wisdom of the people. This is no Eden, however, for war planes fly overhead, climate change has brought long droughts, farms have been planted across the Fulani’s traditional travel routes, and modern technology is luring young men off to urban centers. The Fulani seem mostly unruffled by these threats to their lifestyle, however, adopting what suits them—e.g., plastic pails, flashlight batteries—keeping their faith in their cows, and synchronizing their lives with the seasons.
Readers with hectic lives may find the pace a bit slow, but the poetry in Badkhen’s prose demands that readers slow down and savor her gentle, elegant story.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-248-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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
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