A discursive memoir from Canadian filmmaker and writer Houston (Confessions of an Igloo Dweller, 1996) of his post-Inuit years, mostly a thin gruel of name-dropping and social climbing. Houston had secured his reputation as the man who brought Inuit art to the world marketplace and as an artist of high Arctic images, when, in 1962, he was invited to join the Steuben Glass Company in New York City as a design director. Next thing he knew, he was hobnobbing with the swells in the social whirl. But these events get such glancing treatment, as does his purchase of farmhouses in Rhode Island and Connecticut and the designs he creates for Steuben, that it is difficult to suppress a yawn as Houston flits from one rich-and-famous moment to another: there was that trifling embarrassment with Bill Blass at Grace Mirabella’s party, and the time Howard Payne from the National Geographic Society called him to design the society’s centennial award, and the tarpon fishing at Boca Grande with Arthur Houghton when LBJ kept dropping by. Houston pretends to be just a rube among the giants, but that doesn’t wash, nor does it excuse his witless stories, such as the time, ho ho, when he thought the Chicken Delight delivery man was saying “checkin’ d‘lights,” to which he replies: “Beat it, will you? Our lights are fine. One more ring out of you and I’ll call the cops!” Mostly, it’s all one charmed existence, recounted like the ticks of a metronome—on safari with the Explorers Club, getting a personal tour of the cave paintings of France and Spain, salmon fishing at his little hideaway in the Queen Charlotte Islands, then off up the Orinoco for a touch of adventure—but the experiences are never treated with the kind of appreciation that gives them meaning and elevates them above trophies. Houston’s remembrances, drained of context and maundering, hold as much fascination as seeing your neighbor’s vacation photos for the third time. (48 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1999
ISBN: 0-7710-4208-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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