A winning opening volume in the publisher's new Conservation Leadership series.
A small-town Texan looks back on a life in national politics and conservation.
A writer-in-residence at the Thinking Like a Mountain Foundation in Fort Davis, Texas, Bristol fell in love with America’s national parks while working one youthful summer on a trail crew at Glacier National Park. He then spent years in politics and fundraising gaining the skills and experience that would later allow him to champion the national park system. Growing up in a political family, Bristol came of age in Austin in the “relatively gentle” 1950s. After attending the University of Texas, he joined the young people flocking to the New Frontier in Washington, D.C., where he worked for years as a party activist in the shadows of Hubert Humphrey, Bob Strauss, Lloyd Bentsen and other Democratic figures. In the mid-1970s, Bristol discovered the National Park Foundation, which raises private funds for the parks, and decided he wanted to serve on its board. His eventual appointment, made by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt in 1994, came at a quiet time for the foundation, which had fallen into doldrums in the Reagan era. As Bristol explains, he seized the opportunity to help revitalize the group, attracting significant financial support from corporations and the Rockefeller family. National parks reflect “all the best parts of our democracy,” he writes, revealing the passion that he brought as a consultant to the PBS series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea. He later created the Texas Coalition for Conservation, a nonprofit advocate for the parks of his home state.
A winning opening volume in the publisher's new Conservation Leadership series.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60344-762-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Texas A&M Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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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