Travel dispatches that offer a rare perspective on a world few see so intimately.
Intrepid travelers offer a colorful report on far-flung destinations.
Retired lawyers James and Grossman share an insatiable desire to travel, especially to isolated, sometimes-dangerous places where most tourists fear to go. Drawing on James’ journals, Grossman’s photographs, and their memories, they recount 10 memorable trips to remote sites in countries such as Mali, Ethiopia, Iran, and Algeria. The tone is calmly matter-of-fact even when the author is describing harrowing events: a mother rhino ready to charge in Nepal; a siege of tiny, vicious black ants in Cameroon; stingrays off the coast of Venezuela, where the minuscule puri puri burrowed through mosquito netting and left enough bite marks on James’ leg “to form a dragon tattoo.” Trekking in Nepal, Grossman fell and dislocated her elbow, requiring a helicopter flight to a hospital in Kathmandu where the elbow was painfully reset. But the incident hardly fazed them, and they soon finished their Nepal trip at Chitwan National Park. In Venezuela, James twice became so dehydrated that he needed a saline drip. Rudimentary habitations, mostly lacking plumbing, were part of the adventure. For the most part, they were welcomed warmly in the indigenous communities they visited, sometimes with celebratory rituals. Among the Baka, in Cameroon, after two hours of dances, songs, and games, the villagers sang the couple a song wishing them pleasant dreams. Even in Iran, where they visited in 2008, they were greeted with smiles. The travelers are deeply respectful of the people and cultures they encountered and applaud resistance to Westernization. The “generous, hardworking, and proud” inhabitants of Papua New Guinea, for example, “did not appear to aspire to the economic and social status of former colonists” and to change lives “that are stable, relatively healthy, and aesthetically satisfying.” Still, the authors are forthright about the political problems they observed. They came away from a visit to Gaza in 2009, part of an anti-war delegation, feeling strong support for Palestinian self-determination.
Travel dispatches that offer a rare perspective on a world few see so intimately.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-1350-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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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