A story of dreams and delusions, with more than a soupçon of the pathetic tossed in.
Weil captures the benign madness as Gary Hudson tries to build the first civilian spacecraft.
The “entirely self-taught” Hudson and his cohorts have thus far not had much success; their ships have routinely imploded, exploded, and disintegrated rather than touched the firmament. Weil tries to convey the positive aspects of Hudson's mindset (one of his workers comments, “Some people say that Gary is ba-fucking-nanas, and I would say those people have no vision. I would not go to tea with them. Their souls are dust”), but also shows a penchant, even a desire, for failure shared by many of those closest to him. “We like to set the bar a few inches higher than we can possibly attain,” admits the test site manager. Chronicling Hudson’s three-year quest to build the Roton, a fully reusable spacecraft, Weil's tone is vigilant and lonely. It’s evident from the get-go that the project will not succeed, and the author depicts Hudson as an eternal boy: adolescently charming, messianic, asocial, restless, “refus[ing] to adapt to the mainstream world because that world obscures his hidden genius.” For all the millions he garners from venture capitalists, the world he inhabits is pretty tatty, pasty and remote and disturbingly blinkered. Of course, debut author Weil appreciates, all visionaries are cranks until they bring home the goods, and cutting hard across the grain is the whole point. But Hudson's vehicle is deeply flawed. An aerospace engineer points out that it has the wrong fuel, the wrong number of gears and stages, the wrong hardware, and the wrong business model; tests bear this out, and his funding dries up. It is comforting to know such odd fellows are out there pursuing their outlandish schemes, which might someday be beneficial and in any case are presumably harmless. It is also nice to know they are far away in the desert.
A story of dreams and delusions, with more than a soupçon of the pathetic tossed in.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-553-10886-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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