The joys of travel and and the pleasures of the flesh (especially eating) define a woman's life and a philosophy of excess. The anti-Walden. Harrison (The Astonishing World, 1992, etc.), a long-time travel writer, starts her ninth book off poignantly: At age 60 she can barely breathe as a result of, among other things, a virus picked up on a trip to India. Alas, by the last chapter it is the reader who's gasping. Overwritten and random in form and content, this book is essentially a melding of essays penned over a six year period—some are indeed autobiographical while others pay tribute to her intellectual or materialistic heroes—that portray the author as a deprived child who grew up to drown her sorrows in indulgence. The foods she loves, the locales she adores, even the furnishings in her rooms, are described in such hedonistic and privileged terms that little sympathy can be felt for her terrible childhood as the daughter of a disturbed mother and a possibly homicidal father. There is quite an inventory of possessions, and a bit of namedropping as well: ``A Courtier of the Nizam of Hyderabad gave me a string of carved, unpolished Mogul emeralds,'' she boasts. Not that there aren't some anecdotal pearls: In Bali, a monkey runs off with her Xanax, and later she discovers who owns Napoleon's much-traveled penis. The French emperor aside, Harrison writes much about the men in her life, but, with the exception of a beautiful six-page reverie of her relationship with a black jazz musician, her lovers are as lifeless as her collectibles. The former husband is referred to simply and always as Mr. Harrison. Putting him at a safe distance from her heart may protect her peace of mind, but it does little to deepen her memoir. With no discernable lessons to be learned from this fragmentary record of a very full life, the reader might as well go shopping. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-78000-4
Page Count: 396
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
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
SEEN & HEARD
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