To be sure, some of Stafford’s mental baggage popped open during his latest crazy journey, but his chronicle is, on the...
Further tales from extreme adventurer Stafford (Walking the Amazon, 2011), European Adventurer of the Year in 2011.
The author’s latest is the stuff of nightmares: “No food, no equipment, no knife and not even any clothes.” Alone, on a remote island in the South Pacific. After his two-and-a-half-year ramble the length of the Amazon River, among traffickers, defensive locals and terrorists, what would be next? Greater duration was pointless, but as for in extremis, well, a couple months isolated on a South Pacific island, with absolutely no provisions—except for the video cameras that would record his days for the Discovery Channel—ought to do the trick. Stafford is a fit, adventure- and battle-tested, fairly normal and sociable man, so it came as little surprise that the isolation got to him. His story of those 60 days is raw and acrid, with all the pungency caught on tape clearly adding immediacy to the emotional wrench of the narrative. His physical travails were hardly negligible—the lack of fresh water drove his blood pressure through the roof (as did almost any stressful thing); “coconut tasted like whale blubber, snails like gritty balls of phlegm”; “I woke up to sharp stomach cramps and explosive diarrhea on the beach”—yet it was his mind that was pushed to the most painful places. He was edgy, frustrated, whiny and looking for someone to blame. Then came the little triumphs: building a fire, catching rainwater, finding a tin can, caramelizing coconut, hunting down a goat, and learning to focus and be serene in the face of those things he was not able to change. Ultimately, he notes why the island is uninhabited: “NO BLOODY FRESH WATER. For certain parts of the year the island produces less water than can sustain one male adult.”
To be sure, some of Stafford’s mental baggage popped open during his latest crazy journey, but his chronicle is, on the whole, entertaining.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-218096-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
SEEN & HEARD
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