Fleming’s contributions to history are too often lost in such minutiae, and only the most dogged reader is likely to reach...
A middling entry in the run of recent books on calendars, meridians, and like inventions.
Canadian novelist and memoirist Blaise (I Had a Father, 1993) turns his attention to the largely unknown Sandford Fleming, a Canadian railroad entrepreneur who foresaw the need to develop a system of standard time that would accommodate increasingly rapid travel. Until Fleming’s innovations were put in place, time was a matter of almost individual interpretation; in the 1880s, for instance, Bostonians set their watches 12 minutes ahead of New Yorkers, with strange effects on railroad timetables. Fleming’s development of a universal system, which included the proposal that the day opens far out in the Pacific along a longitude that no nation could claim, eliminated such hiccups, and much of it remains in place today; as the author observes, “Of all the inventions of the Industrial Age, standard time has endured, virtually unchanged, the longest.” Arriving at that standard time, however, required endless calculation and a surprising level of international political haggling. Blaise is quite good at describing the arcana of timekeeping, and he has a deep knowledge of the cultural history of an era in which technological revolution was an almost daily commonplace. But, perhaps belying his English-professor past, he offers a narrative that is clotted with asides on what poets and novelists have had to say about the matter of time (“Juan Rulfo, Carlos Fuentes, García Márquez, and Vargas Llosa have taken Faulknerian time, Proustian time, the Catholic calendar, and even a bit of pre-Columbian aboriginal time to keep history alive for the creation of their own sophisticated myths of eternal return”)—asides that have precious little bearing on his ostensible subject and seem designed only to show off the his trove of literary allusions.
Fleming’s contributions to history are too often lost in such minutiae, and only the most dogged reader is likely to reach the story’s end.Pub Date: April 20, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40176-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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