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CALL OF THE AMERICAN WILD

A TENDERFOOT'S ESCAPE TO ALASKA

Uneven testosterone-fueled entertainment.

The spirited account of how a Scottish newspaper sales executive built and lived in a log cabin in the middle of the Alaskan wilderness.

After being demoted from a prestigious marketing job, writer and outdoorsman Grieve suddenly realized that he had to end what had become an “increasingly mournful journey through the corridors of cubicle hell.” He concluded that the antidote to his woes was to head to the wilds of Alaska, where he could rediscover his masculinity and find a path to freedom for himself and his family. A year later, a series of lucky breaks landed Grieve in a remote forest miles from the nearest human settlement. A hard-bitten Yukon transplant named Don and the members of his extended family educated the ardent Scotsman in the ways of survival and helped him build the log cabin that would become his home. A “neurotic and needy” dog named Fuzzy became Grieve's only companion. At first, the author reveled in the hunting, fishing and trapping that defined his daily routine. But as the harsh Alaskan winter settled on the land, Grieve began to see the extent of the risks he had taken with his life and the future of his family back in Scotland. Yet the headiness of living among bears, moose and wolves, learning how to become a dog-sled driver and surviving against the odds drove him onward and gave him insight into “how utterly small and insignificant” he really was. Grieve's Jack London-esque narrative is engaging, but it is undercut by what comes across as the author's irritatingly impotent feelings of guilt for seeking self-actualization away from his family.

Uneven testosterone-fueled entertainment.

Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-61608-820-0

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing

Review Posted Online: June 23, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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INTO THE WILD

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...

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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.

A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor will it to readers of Krakauer's narrative. (4 maps) (First printing of 35,000; author tour)

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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