A footnote suited to fans of bad-trip travel literature—but only the patient ones.
An inconsequential episode in the history of Amazonian exploration gets dusted off for book-length treatment.
In the 1730s, following a decades-long debate over the shape of planet Earth—the French academician Jacques Cassini arguing for a sausage-like form, the Englishman Isaac Newton holding for the oval—the French government dispatched two teams, one to the Arctic and one to the equator, to map the stars, triangulate their relative positions, and arrive at a definitive answer. The Spanish government, “however bewildered by the request,” agreed to allow the French scientists to poke around in Ecuador, only to take exception to their habit of erecting little geodetic pyramids decorated with the fleur-de-lis, as if to claim the territory for France. One of them, Jean Godin, had meanwhile become a familiar in the Spanish governor’s household and later married his 13-year-old daughter. In 1742, writes English exploration buff and author Smith (Explorers of the Amazon, 1989, etc.), Godin decided to return to France by way of the Amazon to French Guiana; if the route were safe, his young wife, Isabela, would follow. Jean got downriver safely, but, owing to squabbling between their two countries, nearly 20 years passed before Isabela could follow. She ought to have stayed home, for the journey killed all her companions and left her half-mad. Still, she rose to the challenge of traversing the jungle alone, Smith writes, and “became transformed into an active being, far from a replica of her former self but quite dissimilar from the expiring object she had been when lying on the ground.” Whatever that means, it’s typical of Smith’s narrative, which meanders about looking for dramatic moments that never come. Redmond O’Hanlon would have condensed the tale into a well-turned paragraph to illustrate the rigors of Amazonian travel; here, reading about it turns into an epic labor all its own.
A footnote suited to fans of bad-trip travel literature—but only the patient ones.Pub Date: March 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-7867-1048-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2003
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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