A quiet treasure.
A vivid and affectionate memoir of the vanishing traditions of the Saltwater Geechee people living on Sapelo Island, off the coast of Georgia.
Almost all of Sapelo Island is now occupied by a nature preserve and the campus of the University of Georgia Marine Institute, but it was once home to a vibrant African-American community whose isolation from the mainland helped preserve many elements of West African life. Bailey, a lifelong Sapelo resident, remembers her childhood in the villages of Raccoon Bluff and Hog Hammock with a deep awareness of the beauty of her disappearing culture. In simple, lucid language that retains the rhythms of the island’s vernacular, she evokes the spare beauty of the Sea Islands through prosaic, child’s-eye details. The presence of the sea pervades Sapelo Island: “On high tide,” she writes, “you’d smell the salt more and on low tide, you’d get a whiff of the sea and everything in it. . . . ‘Just smell that marsh,’ Mama would say proudly. ‘It smell so marshy.’ ” The author depicts the Geechee community’s close-knit but often troubled family relationships without sentimentality, remembering funeral customs and numbers rackets as well as the daily household rituals of meals and chores. She balances the islanders’ knowledge of animal and plant life, their traditional medicines and garden lore, against the precariousness of survival in the face of illness, poverty, hurricanes, and rip tides. Her memoir provides a valuable record of the most striking Geechee customs, including “ring shouts” (or circle dances), “root” magic, and classic trickster stories; in a moving coda, Bailey describes a trip to Sierra Leone, where she retraced the West African origins of these traditions. But her precise recall of small, easily forgotten daily routines is even more remarkable: poulticing a swollen ankle with mullein (“a plant with big, light green fuzzy leaves”) or fishing for mullet with a homemade cotton-thread net that “glides out over the water, opens into a big, wide circle and sinks down over any fish that happen to be in that spot.”
A quiet treasure.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-49376-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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