Wisdom that spans time and place, from an author perfectly suited to dispense it.
A dairy-farmer-turned-successful-entrepreneur writes to his descendants about lessons learned in life and business.
Krebs has a deep appreciation for the teachings of his ancestors. Time-tested on harsh Wisconsin farms, these dictums guided him from the barn to the boardroom, their wisdom never wavering whether the project at hand was a stroll through a junkyard or the leadership of a corporate team. Filled with inimitable advice on teamwork, problem solving and loyalty, Krebs’ book ably relates how working on a threshing crew or as part of a barn raising informs a successful voyage in all facets of life—and is actually more illuminating than what can be learned at corporate seminars. He breaks his chapters down into sections with practical headings such as “Always Dress for the Job,” “The Need for a Positive Outcome Creates Courage” and “Americans Should Buy American.” Toward the end of the text, in the midst of a touching final chapter, the central metaphor of the book is defined—a barn is a place of shelter and comfort, but the real reward is not the barn itself, rather it’s the lessons and relationships that are forged in the building process. The simple, self-effacing text and the lessons gleaned from his relatives and from his career as a communications entrepreneur amount to a love letter to his family, past and future (superficially aimed at general readers, Krebs acknowledges that his book is truly intended for his grandchildren and their children). Thus, this book may not appeal to all readers, particularly those who have no interest in 19th and 20th century farming practices. But for Krebs’ descendants, it will be a wonderful treat from a thoughtful relative.
Wisdom that spans time and place, from an author perfectly suited to dispense it.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-1456380960
Page Count: 238
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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