A sterling valediction. Lopez’s many followers will treasure this book.
Collected essays from the 2000s by the eminent, late natural history writer.
“Witness, not achievement, is what I was after.” So writes Lopez (1945-2020), the indefatigable world traveler. He sought witness, to be sure: Many of the essays and articles gathered here, first published in such venues as Orion and Granta, center on exploring landscapes and the animals and people within them. “I would bring my binoculars, find a place out of the wind, and pick over the land, acre by acre, watching for movement,” writes the author. The title of the book is suggestive of his concerns for a world being devoured by its human inhabitants. As he scanned the acres, Lopez was collecting images of and data on coal-fired power plants in the American West, linking anthropogenic destruction to natural beauty in order to raise big questions: “Why did you not prepare?” he imagines future generations asking the ancestors of today. “Why were you so profligate while we still had a chance? Where was your wisdom?” The wisdom Lopez sought, recorded here, was often that of Indigenous elders, whether in the Australian Outback, the Arctic, or the South African veldt. That wisdom, writes the author, so often comes in surprising forms, as when an Inuit elder describes how a young hunter learns to appreciate the ethical implications of taking an animal’s life by invoking psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Well aware of his impending death to a cancer undetected until it was too late, Lopez gets deeply personal, writing with clear eyes of that death as well as of the horrific experience of sexual abuse as a child. Altogether, the pieces are honest and searching, engaging readers in the largest of questions: How do we live in the world? How do we see it? How do we protect it? The book features an introduction by Rebecca Solnit.
A sterling valediction. Lopez’s many followers will treasure this book.Pub Date: May 24, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-24282-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
