A moving reminder of the power of the human will.
A touching first-person account of a doughty political activist who walked from California to Washington, D.C., to promote campaign-finance reform.
Haddock (or “Granny D,” as she came to be known) is a tough old Yankee who seems to have stepped straight out of a Reader’s Digest “Most Unforgettable Character” article. She was just a few days shy of her 89th birthday when she began her cross-country hike on January 2, 1999. With help from Common Cause (coauthor Burke is director of Arizona Common Cause), relatives, friends, and a growing number of supporters, she trekked across the western deserts, the plains of Texas, the hills of Arkansas and West Virginia, and eventually through the streets of the nation’s capital to call attention to the issue. Except for 100 miles along the C&O Canal towpath (which she covered on cross-country skis), Haddock walked the entire way. At the rate of ten miles a day (with frequent stops to meet people, make speeches, and give interviews), her journey lasted 14 months. Much of this narrative is taken from her journal, to which she devoted two hours every evening, and most of it deals with events of the walk itself. The self-portrait that emerges makes clear that the author’s late-in-life public venture was not some sudden whim but an act grounded in a lifetime of intelligent concern, forthrightness, and involvement. Haddock includes excerpts from encouraging letters and e-mail messages she received from people following her progress, as well as highlights from some of her speeches (longer excerpts are in an appendix). Whether her efforts succeed in bringing about campaign finance reform remains to be seen, but politicians should be put on notice: this media-savvy old lady is now back in Dublin, New Hampshire, getting in shape for more walks.
A moving reminder of the power of the human will.Pub Date: April 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-50539-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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