Somehow it's not surprising to see Cactus Ed (Hayduke Lives!, 1990, etc.) roar back into view, returned from his last resting place under a rock in a lost desert canyon, to fire invective and inspiration at one and all. Petersen, a longtime Abbey friend, has pulled together a goodly bit of something for everyone in this selection from the extensive journals kept by the writer until his death in 1989 (the last journal is numbered 20). Expected are the powerful environmental exhortations, the religion-bashing, the bilious rants against politicos, urbanism, and eastern critics—not that they are any the less wondrous for that. Nor has Petersen, much to his credit, shielded Abbey from his occasional forays into what could at best be called small-mindedness; some might consider his writings on immigration and population matters plain old bigoted nonsense, even racist nastiness. But these pages also contain Abbey's sometimes fascinating takes on art, music, and writing, on life and death, and, revealingly, glimpses into his domestic affairs, which seemed to always be on the boil. (His fifth wife referred to him as ``a damned difficult man.'') Given much airtime, and beveling the writer's hard-edged reputation, is the love Abbey confesses for his five children, although how that translated into deed is another matter undiscussed. But the old reprobate will be best remembered for his deft evocations of the desert Southwest, a land he saw badly abused during his lifetime, a land he tried to protect. Abbey deserves a special place on the long list of American rabble-rousers like Tom Paine and Bill Haywood—as he would no doubt proudly, if cantankerously, agree. (Photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-00415-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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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