A powerful evocation of a vanishing way of life.
A portrait of one of the last subsistence trapper/hunters in Alaska.
Journalist Campbell spent parts of two years living with and observing his cousin Heimo Korth, Heimo’s Eskimo wife Edna, and their two teenage daughters in their cabin hundreds of miles from civilization. Born in 1955, Heimo spent his boyhood years in Wisconsin. Realizing that he didn’t fit into his father’s blue-collar world, Heimo moved to Alaska, planning to live off the land. Like many others who made that move, he barely survived his first exposure to the far north. Campbell vividly depicts the hazards of a world in which temperatures can run 40 below zero—on a good day—and even the slightest mistake can kill a man. Mentored by an older trapper and by native Alaskans who taught him wilderness skills, Heimo gradually began to make a living selling the pelts of wolves, martens, wolverines, and other animals he trapped. He learned to bring down a moose or caribou with a single shot, butcher it in the field, and carry the meat to his hand-built cabin. Every member of the Korth family contributed to their support, with the two girls becoming as adept at wilderness skills as their father. But by the time Campbell visited them, the lure of the modern world was making itself felt. Heimo’s daughters longed for the “normal” life with friends their own age that they experienced when the Korths spent part of the year in town. Alaska was changing, and now Heimo could barely earn enough from his trapping to sustain his family’s lifestyle, into which modern devices such as cell phones and computers began to creep. Heimo’s endurance and courage are admirable, and Campbell does his best to portray them in a way that even citified readers can appreciate.
A powerful evocation of a vanishing way of life.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7434-5313-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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
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