A provocative and controversial conservationist encapsulates his opinions and suggestions for restoring the health of a planet at risk. Brower (For Earth's Sake, 1990) has reached the ripe age of 82, and this slim volume feels like a swan song—or perhaps he might prefer to call it ``goose music,'' referring to the tonic of wildness that we all must hear, appreciate, and identify with in order to save our soiled Earth. Aided by Chapple (Kayaking the Full Moon, 1993), Brower runs through a handful of eco-ideas, some more familiar than others: putting boundaries around cities, linking protected animal havens to allow natural migration, encouraging eco-tourism, reining in our overuse of the automobile, and turning to solar power. He waxes enthusiastic on the subject of reducing forest consumption, and his own words are printed here on paper made from kenaf, a hibiscus relative whose development as a tree substitute might eventually protect our last acres of old-growth forest. Brower urges that efforts be made to promote ``CPR for the Earth'': conservation, preservation, and restoration. The book is a mother lode of quotable sayings from the man best known to readers from John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid, and sometimes style obscures content. Brower has a wonderful, folksy voice, and though he has more enemies than most conservationists, he has also become a mythic figure in the environmental movement—so it feels almost disloyal to note that a towering ego shows through his comments. In addition, the Archdruid's prescriptions are fairly vague, though it could be argued that this is a statement of personal mission, not a grant proposal. Unapologetic and defiant as ever, Brower has penned a manifesto for those who would pick up his torch. Whether his methods have been more help or hindrance to his cause is still to be decided. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-06-252033-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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