A superior example of Mowat’s chronicling powers, illuminating a grand Canadian region that was about to change forever.
Master wilderness storyteller Mowat (High Latitudes, 2003, etc.) spins a rousing tale of travels through the Canadian Far North during 1947, darkened a bit by forebodings about the future.
The author went to the barren lands west of Hudson Bay in the postwar period as an assistant to a scientist he immediately disliked. Mowat considered their work “little more than high-grade plundering ventures devoted to slaughtering everything non-human or non-domesticated,” and he’d had had enough of that during the war. So before long he took ill-tempered parting from the scientist and pushed off with Charles Schweder, a Metis trapper. They checked on Schweder’s lines as they roved, but mostly the pair explored parts unknown, experienced the great migration of caribou, and met native people, inland-dwelling Inuit uncorrupted by contact with the population to the south. Mowat also ran into curious pockets of white settlers and gathered their stories; he hunted for the stories of the Indians and the Metis he encountered as well. To these narratives, he brings his acute observational powers and participatory enthusiasm, which also fire his descriptions of a land of golden eskers, big spruce, clear lakes, green willow swales, freshwater seals, crashing rapids, grizzlies and ptarmigan, and, always, mosquitoes. Mowat deplores the Canadian government’s abuse of native peoples, the diseases that decimated their number, the relief supplies that never came as promised to the dislocated populations. Even the missionaries, he notes, “speculated that the native’s pagan beliefs might have brought them nearer to God than did . . . Christianity.” The author shows off skills developed over decades as he comfortably sets the scene (“I spent the best part of my childhood roaming the central Saskatchewan prairie”) and alludes to the life of roaming to come.
A superior example of Mowat’s chronicling powers, illuminating a grand Canadian region that was about to change forever.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7867-1430-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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