Amid his mother's dying from brain cancer, the loss of his job, and a doctor's diagnosis that his case of the ``meat bucket blues'' was ``treatable'' depression, Middleton (On the Spine of Time, 1991, etc.) finds renewal in fishing the wild waters of cold mountain streams. Fired in June 1990 from a sportswriting job with the Southern Progress Corporation (he replays over and over his firing by his ``friend the CEO,'' whom he'd just given a fly-fishing lesson), Middleton heads to Denver, where he spends two years working on ``county garbage truck No. 2'' with a former professor of medieval history who was fired for stealing a turkey from a barbecue spit. The author attends weekly therapy sessions with one Lilly Mutzpah, who tells him that his depression is ``inherited, genetic, a kind of sadness passed along from generation to generation.'' In Denver, he also befriends ``Swami Bill,'' who wears an apple-green monk's robe and sports a stuffed parrot on his shoulder. The swami and his ``main squeeze,'' Kiwi LaReaux, run the Holistic Motor Court, Ashram, and Coin Laundry. Middleton fishes the South Platte, then heads to the nearby Sawatch mountains, which, Kiwi says, exude ``cosmic amounts of invisible pure crystal healing energy. But you gotta breathe deeply.'' She and the other zanies Middleton meets prepare him—as well as the reader—for the painful, graphically depicted death of Middleton's mother. Her eyes—turned bright blue from cancer treatments—as well as the clouded eyes of a blind trout provide obvious symbols for the author's new insights into himself. Fly fishing meets the New Age in this uneven work that veers from the sublimely ridiculous to the heart-rendingly profound.
Pub Date: Aug. 19, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-75859-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
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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