FitzGerald overcomes her book's few flaws to produce an absorbing tale of survival, love, and the generosity of people who...
The account of a transformational South American odyssey that tested the author and her husband to the limit.
In March 1973, having missed their boat after surviving a plane crash at a remote outpost in Peru, FitzGerald and her husband were forced to take a makeshift raft down Rio Madre de Dios to Riberalta, Bolivia, en route to Brazil. What was supposed to be a journey of a few days became a harrowing ordeal. The author’s story of the inexperienced rafters being swept by a storm into a tributary they could barely escape, their extreme privation and miseries—weeks trapped in a jungle swamp without shelter, food, or fresh water—is vivid and consistently compelling. FitzGerald often writes fine, lyrical descriptions, especially of nature, though when mooning over her husband, the prose turns purple and overwrought, better suited to a romance novel than a gritty survival adventure. However, considering what the couple endured, the periodic spasms of over-the-top romanticism and superstition can be forgiven, and readers will admire their remarkable fortitude. FitzGerald is at her best when detailing their many challenges or suggesting states of mind. “Despite my physical debilitation,” she writes, “my mind had achieved a heightened clarity. My vision of life was now stripped to the bone. As starvation consumed my body, its effects also trimmed the fat and gristle from my thoughts.” Since her journal was lost early in the trip and FitzGerald had to record their trial by other means, some readers may question the accuracy of her moment-by-moment recollections, and occasionally, credulity is strained. We also learn little of the young couple’s remarkable globe-hopping before and after the disaster, apart from listings of places visited.
FitzGerald overcomes her book's few flaws to produce an absorbing tale of survival, love, and the generosity of people who helped save their lives.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-525-43277-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Vintage Departures
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
