Adventure reading of a high order: brisk, fresh and full of color. (24 pp. b&w ills., not seen and excellent maps...
A fine and lively collection of exploration stories, from the famous to the obscure, that are guaranteed not to be forgotten.
Fleming (The Sword and the Cross, 2003, etc.) brings to these tales a round-the-campfire storyteller’s verve and a poet’s gift for compression. The feats are divided into three sections—reconnaissance, inquiry and endeavor—and there are forty-four of them, ranging from the exploits of Marco Polo to Umberto Nobile’s crazywild airship journey to the North Pole. Fleming provides the context and consequences of the deeds—why James Cook got his goose handed to him in Hawaii; the impact of Lewis and Clark’s transcontinental trek, which was nothing less than a great colonial detonation on the American West; and the secondary motivation behind the Great Survey of India (in addition to mapping the subcontinent, it was a way of gathering military intelligence on places like Afghanistan and Tibet). Brevity is one of Fleming’s strong suits; none of the pieces is more than twenty pages long, some as short as five (and though they are not especially designed as such, they make for good bedtime reading and interesting dreams). There are deliciously clandestine characters like the pundits of the Greta Survey, all manner of otherworldliness (see in particular Edward Whymper’s visit from an apparition) and ill-fated souls aplenty, including Adolphus Greeley’s expedition to Ellesmere Island that found the starving crew munching on their oilskin sleeping bags, George De Long’s grisly end in Siberia and the mystery of John Franklin’s end in his search across the badlands of Canada for a northwest passage. There isn’t a dud in the lot, and Fleming has provided a bibliography of both primary and secondary sources for readers whose tastes for any one of these exploits has been whetted.
Adventure reading of a high order: brisk, fresh and full of color. (24 pp. b&w ills., not seen and excellent maps throughout)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2005
ISBN: 0-87113-899-9
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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