A vital addition to the library of the far north and of exploration.
“Fierce winter never relented”: searching for a little-known explorer who left his name on many places, themselves little known, in the Canadian Arctic.
It’s not enough for Castner (All the Ways We Kill and Die, 2016, etc.) to have survived roadside bombs in Iraq, an experience he recounted in The Long Walk (2012). Now he sets off in search of Arctic explorer Alexander Mackenzie (1764-1820) and the river named for him, the second longest in North America, which traverses a country of few humans and plenty of bears. As the author writes appreciatively at the opening, the Mackenzie River is “so wide that the far bank appeared to be little more than a slight film of green,” while the island that stands at the river’s egress into the Arctic Ocean “is larger than five Manhattans.” He adds, “everything about [it] is enormous.” So it is, with an appropriately big story to match. Castner handles its several components skillfully, covering all the bases: for one, he provides a lively biography of Mackenzie, the youngest principal in the Northwest Company, contending not just with the rigors of exploration, but also with early corporate politics. For another, he covers the territory, traveling in what he conjectures to be Mackenzie’s footsteps and paddle traces in search of the fabled, elusive Northwest Passage, a pathway now easier to chart given thawing permafrost and melting ice caps. Every American knows the story of Lewis and Clark, Castner writes, surely too charitably; why, then, would we not know of Mackenzie and his legendary explorations? “And if I could trace the Missouri and Colorado rivers,” he writes, “if I knew how the Hudson and Lake Champlain got their names, how could I not do the same for this river, greater than them all?” In the end, that challenge is rhetorical, for Castner pays for that knowledge with no end of sweat, toil, and even some blood and tears.
A vital addition to the library of the far north and of exploration.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-385-54162-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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