Though some pieces begin jauntily but fade into irrelevance, Morris generally keeps readers engaged, as she has done...
The nonagenarian historian and travel writer invites us into her private world with a mixed but amiable daily diary of her thoughts, observations, and reflections.
Morris (Battleship Yamato, 2018, etc.) does not dwell overmuch on the indignities and tribulations of old age; rather, she celebrates the fact that she is still alive and (mostly) kicking, taking pleasure in the grand and mundane in like measure. She does not mention being a pioneering transsexual, nor—since her traveling days are now few—her fame as one of our most accomplished travel writers and historians. Many of the entries are lighter than air, others nostalgic or wistful, chipper or gloomy, lilting and poetic, naïve or mildly cynical. Some deploy philosophical insights on the human condition and sharp assessments of current world events. The book moves from humor to veiled melancholy to sharply delineated sense of place, with some of the author’s own sprightly verse for grace notes. While her chief subject is her home of 70 years, Wales, Morris definitely has some bees in her bonnet. Whatever pops into her head gets equal time, from Brexit and agnosticism to the abomination of zoos, the malleability of memory, the better angels of Britain's imperial era, the U.K.'s current malaise, her special affection for the United States, the intimate presence of the books in her personal library, the horrors of the daily news, the spellbinding mysteries of birds, and the seductive traps of ego. There's also an ode to Montaigne, asides on her longtime companion Elizabeth, a dissection of monarchical absurdities, an appreciation of technological advancements, an accounting of the marvelous menagerie of keepsakes in her home, and an elegy for the changing nature of the English character.
Though some pieces begin jauntily but fade into irrelevance, Morris generally keeps readers engaged, as she has done successfully for decades.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63149-536-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
IN THE NEWS
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.
