An elegant memoir of a meaningful life.
A call to protect “our blue frontier and last great wilderness commons at sea.”
Helvarg (Rescue Warriors: The U.S. Coast Guard, America’s Forgotten Heroes, 2009, etc.) has led an adventurous life as a journalist, private investigator, producer of documentary films and a political activist. During his boyhood on the north shore of Queens, New York, he witnessed the destruction of the wetlands he loved. While attending Boston University in the late ’60s, he was arrested for participating in an antiwar riot. He promptly dropped out of college in 1971 and moved to San Diego to organize against the war. It was there that he became an avid bodysurfer and began his “lifelong connection to the ocean.” Resuming his education, he transferred to Goddard College, which had a work-study program that allowed him to study urban warfare firsthand in Northern Ireland, laying the groundwork for his future career as a journalist. After graduation, he returned to San Diego where he edited a small weekly newspaper and wrote articles about navy dolphins, navy nuclear weapons, white sharks, offshore oil drilling and other marine topics. He discovered that the two major marine-biological research centers—Scripps on the West coast and Woods Hole in Cape Cod—were heavily involved in Cold War research, to the detriment of oceanographic biology and marine ecology. Although he is a willing risk taker who welcomes the challenges of rough water and covering war zones, he writes movingly about how the “sea, like death, has been the main theme in my life; it has provided rapture, joy, solitude, and solace at different points along the journey.” Now approaching 60, Helvarg has dedicated his remaining years to the “protection, exploration, and restoration of our living seas,” even though he is no longer a young radical.
An elegant memoir of a meaningful life.Pub Date: May 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-312-56706-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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