An excellent lesson in the history and culture of a most English pursuit.
Shilling takes up foxhunting in middle age and finds adventure and thrills—and gets an insider's view of one of the great conflicts of contemporary British society.
London Times columnist Shilling is an accidental hunter. While casting about for a new hobby, the unrepentant urbanite decides to try a few horseback riding lessons. (This despite her lifelong aversion to exercise.) When she finds herself at the Rooting Street stables, under the frighteningly capable tutelage of one Mrs. Rogers, however, Shilling suddenly realizes that she desperately wants to become an accomplished rider, and that it will be far more difficult than she’d imagined. Moreover, she wants to go foxhunting, a goal that will give meaning to the hundreds of lessons and the endless expenditure. Thus, over the course of some years, she acquires a horse of her own and eventually rides out with the Ashford Valley Hunt in Kent—a feeble horsewoman, perhaps, but a dogged one. Shilling is equally determined to make clear to the reader the myriad seductions of what is now a banned pursuit in England, although her book was published before Parliament’s February 2005 decision. She presents the deep involvement with the countryside that hunting brings, the intricate relationship of human and hound, the camaraderie of those who understand the siren pull of the hunt and the ongoing conflict between anti-hunting activists and the Countryside Alliance, along with a great deal of foxhunting history. The whole is spiced with humor. Shiller, who is ambivalent about killing a fox, wonders at one point if her new hobby is akin to “poor, mad Zelda Fitzgerald and her loopy attempts to train as a ballet dancer.”
An excellent lesson in the history and culture of a most English pursuit.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-7681-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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