An addictive book for nature lovers.
An expert tree-climber and wildlife cameraman introduces readers to a handful of his favorite trees and related adventures.
Aldred has vast filming experience with National Geographic and other outfits, and his specialty is climbing massive trees to set up blinds or just get the shot that a particular scene demands. Here, the author highlights 10 serious climbs—from England to Borneo to the Congo to Costa Rica to Morocco to Peru—detailing the lengths he and his colleagues have gone to arrange for such shoots. Each chapter is a stand-alone story in its own right, with drama, shocks, grimy interludes, and unparalleled views. While Aldred is clearly obsessed with trees, he also respects them greatly and takes all the caution necessary to climb trees that sometimes reach more than 300 feet. The book wouldn’t be complete without the author’s facing plenty of physical and mental challenges, including cerebral malaria, maggots crawling under his skin, and trying to get a footing on the perfect, thorn-laden branch to get a photo of a harpy eagle nesting—as its mother attempts to poke at his eyes. Aldred does two things particularly well: He avoids being unnecessarily macho, and he pauses to commune with the trees and to appreciate their history and the sanctuary he finds in their sky-high branches. “Whether the soft shimmering glow of a beech canopy in springtime, or the vast sun-blasted canopy of a tropical giant,” he writes, “each tree has a unique character, and it is the privileged feeling of getting to know them a little better—of physically connecting with them, if only for a short while—that draws me back into their branches time and time again.” Truly connecting with these behemoths might mean encounters with dangerous creatures or the pleasure of admiring a gorgeous poison-dart frog carrying its tadpoles on its back “high up into the canopy to deposit them within water-filled bromeliads.”
An addictive book for nature lovers.Pub Date: May 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-47305-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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