Tender, anecdotal glimpses of life in the far Canadian north at mid-20th century, from a prolific novelist (Running West, 1990, etc.) and artist. Houston headed to the land of the Inuit on a whim (he simply hopped a plane north) and a prayer. He was clueless as to Inuit language and custom, untutored as to surviving in the austere landscape, but thunderstruck by the beauty of the place. When he was given a couple of small Inuit stone carvings in exchange for portraits he had drawn, a light flickered on in his skull: He would become a dealer in Inuit artwork, selling carvings as well as prints (the Inuit had always been skilled carvers and began making prints in the 1950s), and thus earn his meal ticket to the Arctic- -and, not incidentally, earn a boodle for the artists at the same time. From 1948 to 1962 he traveled extensively throughout the territory, bartering for art while sampling and celebrating the Inuit way of life: dog-sledding, walrus hunting, navigating through a whiteout, the customary roll in the hay with his friend's wife, the architecture of the igloo, the beauties of a native kayak (``the early slanting sunlight made the kayak partly transparent, showing its inner ribs in a golden glow''). Framed in a series of quick, chatty vignettes, these tales of Houston's rambles and the life he builds in the far north are warm and avuncular, and they have the feel of performance art; you don't so much read the book as listen to it being told. There are moments when he strikes a discordantly quaint tone (when he fell in the water: ``It was nippy!''; the airplanes are primitive, with ``none of that newfangled stuff''), but for the most part, Houston's natural storytelling talents shine from the page. Sheer entertainment, as fascinating as it is charming. (40 line drawings)
Pub Date: April 16, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-78890-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1996
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
SEEN & HEARD
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