A hushed, meditative tribute to the nearly forgotten value of living off the land.
Novelist Kessler (Birds in Fall, 2006, etc.) chronicles the time he and his wife spent among dairy goats in rural Vermont.
Burned out from the daily grind of New York City, Kessler and his wife Dona purchased a 75-acre parcel of land to establish a working goat farm. The author details their foray into pastoral living with all the imagery and polished word choice one would expect from a practiced novelist. From the daily challenges and rewards of acquiring, shepherding, breeding and milking Nubian goats and birthing young kids, to their first experience with cheese-making, Kessler’s account serves as a user-friendly how-to manual on goat farming. The author also delves into the foundations and history of goat keeping, the predator/prey relationship (as he tracks the coyotes that are frequenting his barnyard) and man’s quest for a spiritual connection with other creatures and the land that sustains him. The book is more than just a story of escape from urban monotony; it’s also a detailed diary of the transformative effects of a new beginning. Because the entries don’t always cohere as a chronological narrative, the chapters are short, conclusions are somewhat choppy and the material, while interesting, is exceedingly quiet in tone. Nonetheless, Kessler pleasingly echoes the work of Annie Dillard and Georgeanne Brennan’s A Pig in Provence (2007).
A hushed, meditative tribute to the nearly forgotten value of living off the land.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4165-6099-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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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