The absorbing story of wilderness explorer Everett Ruess, who has gained a cult-like following since his disappearance in 1934.
In adventure writer Roberts’ (The Last of His Kind: The Life and Adventures of Bradford Washburn, America’s Boldest Mountaineer, 2010) latest, the author examines the life of Ruess, who was born in 1914 to caring, if over-involved parents. From a young age, he was fascinated with nature. At 16, he set off on the first of his expeditions, hitchhiking from Los Angeles to Carmel, then moving on to Big Sur. Roberts depicts Ruess as intelligent but somewhat naïve, and completely unable to support himself. He became increasingly dependent on his cash-strapped parents to fund his wanderings, and his sense of entitlement deepened over the course of his short life. The author relies on Ruess’ surviving letters and journals to paint a portrait of the explorer, and they reveal a moody, pensive and often troubled young man who had a disdain for sedentary life: “I don’t think I could ever settle down. I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax.” The second half of the book delves into the possible fate of the explorer, presenting readers with four possible outcomes: suicide, murder, accidental death or withdrawal into hiding. Roberts explores each of these avenues thoroughly, providing both sides of each argument before laying out his own investigation. Though readers may be left with niggling doubts—Roberts chronicles many hoaxes with regards to Ruess’ disappearance—in the end, he makes a convincing case. A well-researched, readable look at a complex personality in wilderness exploration.
Pub Date: July 19, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59176-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The acclaimed author of My Own Country (1996) turns his gaze inward to a pair of crises that hit even closer to home than the AIDS epidemic of which he wrote previously. Verghese took a teaching position at Texas Tech’s medical school, and it’s his arrival in the unfamiliar city of El Paso that triggers the events of his second book (parts of which appeared in the New Yorker). His marriage, already on the rocks in My Own Country, has collapsed utterly and the couple agree to a separation. In a new job in a new city, he finds himself more alone than he has ever been. But he becomes acquainted with a charming fourth-year student on his rotation, David, a former professional tennis player from Australia. Verghese, an ardent amateur himself, begins to play regularly with David and the two become close friends, indeed deeply dependent on each other. Gradually, the younger man begins to confide in his teacher and friend. David has a secret, known to most of the other students and staff at the teaching hospital but not to the recently arrived Verghese; he is a recovering drug addict whose presence at Tech is only possible if he maintains a rigorous schedule of AA meetings and urine tests. When David relapses and his life begins to spiral out of control, Verghese finds himself drawn into the young man’s troubles. As in his previous book, Verghese distinguishes himself by virtue not only of tremendous writing skill—he has a talented diagnostician’s observant eye and a gift for description—but also by his great humanity and humility. Verghese manages to recount the story of the failure of his marriage without recriminations and with a remarkable evenhandedness. Likewise, he tells David’s story honestly and movingly. Although it runs down a little in the last 50 pages or so, this is a compulsively readable and painful book, a work of compassion and intelligence.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-06-017405-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.
A collection of affirmations, noncloying and often provocative, about the things that make justice worth fighting for and life worth living.
Gay—a poet whose last book, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, bears the semantically aligned title Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015)—is fully aware that all is not well in the world: “Racism is often on my mind,” he writes by way of example. But then, he adds, so are pop music, books, gardening, and simple acts of kindness, all of which simple pleasures he chronicles in the “essayettes” that make up this engaging book. There is much to take delight in, beginning with the miraculous accident of birth, his parents, he writes, a “black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination.” As that brief passage makes clear, this is not a saccharine kind of delight-making but instead an exercise in extracting the good from the difficult and ugly. Sometimes this is a touch obvious: There’s delight of a kind to be found in the odd beauty of a praying mantis, but perhaps not when the mantis “is holding in its spiky mitts a large dragonfly, which buzzed and sputtered, its big translucent wings gleaming as the mantis ate its head.” Ah, well, the big ones sometimes eat the little ones, and sometimes we’re left with holes in our heads, an idiom that Gay finds interesting if also sad: “that usage of the simile implies that a hole in the head, administered by oneself, might be a reasonable response.” No, the reasonable response is, as Gay variously enumerates, to resist, enjoy such miracles as we can, revel in oddities such as the “onomatopoeicness of jenky,” eat a pawpaw whenever the chance to do so arises, water our gardens, and even throw up an enthusiastic clawed-finger air quote from time to time, just because we can.
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-792-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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