At journey's end, a failed moral compass.
The coauthors of several works on Will Rogers (A Will Rogers Treasury, not reviewed, etc.) now turn their attention to the man who flew him to his death: famed and, in their estimation, deeply flawed aviator Wiley Post.
Even airplane buffs who can recite chapter and verse on Lindbergh's singular adventure are unlikely to remember much about the overshadowed Post (1899–1935) apart from his untimely end, so this recounting may be revealing, if hardly suspenseful, to many. Post set and later broke his own record for solo circumnavigation, tested the first pressurized suit at the edge of the stratosphere, and was probably the first pilot to deliberately hitch a ride on what would later be known as the Jet Stream. An expansive font of data (thanks to an older brother's autobiography) on the Post family's hardscrabble farm-country peregrinations in Texas prior to Wiley's birth keeps readers waiting overlong for his early barnstorming adventures. Still, this narrative does establish a certain wistfulness about the withdrawn, undereducated tinkerer who bootstrapped himself out of the Dust Bowl and onto Page One in the 1930s. Post packed his host of aviation milestones into a scant ten-year career, a particularly astounding accomplishment since he had no depth perception due to the loss of his left eye in an accident at age 26. The Sterlings imply with insight that the same willfulness with which Post neutralized this handicap could also have led to his fatal crash. Their treatment of aeronautical detail seems sometimes simplistic, but they exhaustively document a cumulative pattern of impatience, annoyance with details, rule-fudging, corner-cutting, and, ultimately, lack of integrity that led directly to the August day in 1935 near Point Barrow, Alaska, when Post refused to play it safe for the last time—and took Rogers down with him.
At journey's end, a failed moral compass.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7867-0894-8
Page Count: 356
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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