An unvarnished, mostly bewildered and touchingly human memoir.
Two years as a Mormon missionary in Belgium.
Harline (European History/BYU; Conversions: Two Family Stories from the Reformation and Modern America, 2011, etc.) spends a good deal of this reminiscence clowning around in a charming fashion, like the harmless and naïve teenager he was when he accepted a two-year mission to proselytize the Mormon faith in Belgium. Unfortunately, Belgium was a land of Catholics, and Harline had been taught “that the Catholic Church was wicked. And weird. The Church of the Devil. The Whore of All the Earth….Wouldn’t all those Belgian people in Catholic darkness be glad to see me?” However, the Belgians were not in the market for Harline’s goods, and the author knew he was not cut from the proselytizer’s cloth. He did not like the doors shut in his face, the poor Belgian weather, the dogs sent out to investigate his presence, the occasional display of firearms and, probably most of all, the near misses. Furthermore, he had to conduct himself in Dutch, a language he found “close to alarming.” But he was not without faith and humor; he was not just a devout young man, but a searcher. He was open to the sublime, and he found it in Belgium’s timeless places, such as a forest near the village of Godsheide in the late-afternoon winter light, where “we knew we were in some other world, like we and every person, thing, and place we’d ever known, done, or been were all there too, at once…toujours vu, always seen.” Along the way, Harline learned a lot about being himself and had many profound experiences. In his memoir, he displays a fine mix of pathos and hilarity as he describes imagining what people made of his Dutch, laughing at his “stainless-steel suit,” and giving thanks for the virtues learned and the connections made.
An unvarnished, mostly bewildered and touchingly human memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8028-7150-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Eerdmans
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
