Reflective thoughts and vibrant specifics bring a nature biologist's love of the outdoors to readers.
A wildlife biologist shares some of his adventures in the field.
During his 30-year career with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (he retired in 2004), Smith (Life on the Rocks: A Portrait of the American Mountain Goat, 2014, etc.) had his fair share of “joy, wonder, and drama” in the wilderness, and he shows readers how to “discover a deeper connection and greater purpose in conserving the rich wild heritage we all share.” Each essay is a snapshot of the life of a wildlife biologist and naturalist, written with the kind of exacting details one would expect from someone trained to be observant in nature. "Long, cobalt silhouettes of junipers slipped beneath as we chased our shadow across the dissected sagelands,” he writes in the first chapter. “An immature golden eagle sporting white-banded tail feathers, the decorative plumes prized by Plains Indians, streaked past the helicopter's left door….It was a great day to be alive, soaring with the eagle." When the helicopter crashes, readers are plunged into the waist-deep snow with Smith and his companions as they struggle to find shelter and notify someone of their whereabouts. The author also shares his anguish over shooting a mountain goat, the stress of being lost on a mountainside, how he navigates an encounter with a black bear with cubs, what he does when a sudden storm appears while fishing, and the dismay he feels when he discovers previously visited areas have become devoid of life. The prose is rich with details on the flora and fauna, and it’s also nostalgic, the musings of an older man reflecting on his life, his work, and the world he loves, which he sees changing primarily due to climate change and human incursions.
Reflective thoughts and vibrant specifics bring a nature biologist's love of the outdoors to readers.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8816-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bison/Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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