The photographs, many mere snapshots, reinforce suspicion that this is a private memoir for distribution to family and...
An account of luxury-travel adventures for the well-to-do.
Serial entrepreneur Kent, who made his first score crafting bracelets from elephants’ tails, began life in colonial circumstances: his father was “a soldier of the King’s African Rifles who spoke fluent Swahili and had been trained as an administrator for the British Empire,” and his mother was a nurse and all-around I-can-manage person. Snakes, leopards, lions, rhinos, mosquito netting, polo ponies, curry luncheons—all were in a day’s work for the Kents. After the family manor was expropriated following Kenyan independence, they organized a bush tour and safari business. Abercrombie & Kent is now among the highest of the high-end outdoor luxury-tour packagers. The author writes affectingly of being an outsider in closed-off, class-ridden Britain (notably at Sandhurst, where, he writes, “my rather untamed upbringing in Africa clearly has been quite apart from the much more aristocratically polished backgrounds from whence my classmates come"). The experience, it seems, engendered in him a desire to prove his supposed betters wrong by becoming rich (“in my early thirties, I make my first million dollars"). With wealth and a growing business catering to the even wealthier, Kent becomes inclined to hobnob and name-drop; the latter part of his book is sprinkled with Burtons and Huttons and Radziwills and anonymes such as one “Big Apple Billionaire.” The best parts of the book will engage students of entrepreneurship, as Kent fearlessly leaps into action to take advantage of world events—calling on the Egyptian government after Sadat’s assassination, for instance, to ink an exclusive tourism deal.
The photographs, many mere snapshots, reinforce suspicion that this is a private memoir for distribution to family and clients that somehow escaped into the world. Of some interest to outsiders, though, for revealing that “Shanghai Peking duck is much better than Peking Peking duck” and similar arcana.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-229920-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2015
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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