Thought provoking and engaging in the style of Bruce Chatwin or Paul Theroux, with ample sides of Thomas Merton and Augusten...
Peripatetic ruminations on the meaning of life and finding a sense of direction accompany Lewis-Kraus across three very different countries.
Whatever one’s reasons for undertaking the Camino de Santiago—spiritual, touristic, to lose weight, or just for the opportunity to complain about the blisters—the experience is memorable. For the author, a freelance essayist, the trip began as a spontaneous diversion, a chance to temporarily leave behind the tediousness of everyday life and reconnect with a friend who similarly had too much free time. Sardonic discussions about the meaninglessness of blindly following an ancient footpath seamlessly give way to nuggets of personal insight both sacred and secular, and Lewis-Kraus was moved to follow the trek with a Hasidic pilgrimage to Ukraine and a circuit of 88 Buddhist temples in Japan. Pilgrims, beyond “look[ing] at each bus going by with the affection Robert Frost had for woodpiles,” spend much time deep in conversation about subjects as diverse as giraffes, the apostles and the “lazy geographical determinism of Northern Europeans.” However, the humor and the physical torment mask an inner journey through the realm of relationships, aspirations and the soul. Using the not-entirely-dissimilar legends and disciplines of Catholicism, Judaism and Buddhism as a spatial framework and scenic background, Lewis-Kraus explores the subtle impulses that drive people to follow certain paths. High-minded flights of intellectual fancy, however, are only so much use when the physical world, in the form of “a flatulent mixture of schwitz and acrid stewed kasha” intrudes.
Thought provoking and engaging in the style of Bruce Chatwin or Paul Theroux, with ample sides of Thomas Merton and Augusten Burroughs.Pub Date: May 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-59448-725-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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