Italian aviator and novelist del Giudice (Lines of Light, 1988) poetically exalts the mystery and the mortal balance of flight in this slender but affecting volume of essays. Comprising personal recollections set amid stories of heroism and death in WW II and after, del Giudice's transcendent writings belie the book's prosaic title. Following the account of his first solo flight (``You would place first takeoff alongside first lovemaking, for the intensity of the two is identical,'' he muses), he writes a curious dreamlike episode of two ghostly pilots on a deserted airstrip reflecting over their desperate maneuvers in the last six minutes of their doomed flight through an icy cloud. He ponders the transition from his childhood imaginings of himself as an airplane to the adult flier: ``As an airplane, I belonged to the century of the switch to things . . . a century which has solidified fantasies into objects.'' An essay titled ``Reaching Dew Point'' relates a scary episode—recounted in the most meditative fashion—of the author's flying into an immense cloud and completely losing his bearings. Torn between using the objective, emotionless jargon of the pilot in asking for help and calling out, ``Treviso radar, I do not want to die,'' he gives in to protocol, admitting, however, ``Away from flight . . . in the domain of everything else, you would have detested such a use of words as a way of hiding behind `objectivity' and `putting on a brave front.' '' Also here, strikingly reminiscent of a more recent tragedy, is a recreation of the last minutes of a 1980 flight of an Italian passenger jet that mysteriously blew up, and of its reconstruction after being fished from the sea. Fittingly, del Giudice's final essay has him flying along the route taken by Antoine de Saint- ExupÇry on the morning before his plane disappeared somewhere off Corsica in 1944. A beautifully contemplative, lyrically soaring collection of essays for the earthbound flier.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-15-100269-X
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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
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