Daniel’s time alone is potent, a dilation on the amusements and scorchings of the simple life, and a distillation of the...
A candid but polished sojourn into solitude and memory.
Late in 2000, poet and essayist Daniel (Winter Creek, 2002, etc.) took himself deep into the backcountry of Oregon for a few months of solitude, to a cabin without electricity or neighbors, tucked into a canyon with forested slopes. The Rogue River slid by within earshot, and there was a meadow to watch the comings and goings of wildlife. Daniel was there to see how he might grow, what he might learn, from the quietude, but he got distracted. The memory of his father, Franz Daniel, was a prime diversion and puzzle. Franz was an intellectual with rural roots, a union organizer of uncommon zeal and charisma, drawn to the ministry but more so to applied religion, social justice, decency—and the bottle. As Daniel goes about his distracted way—dueling with the turkey that’s eating his garden goods, tendering a theory of grouse (they know when a human in their midst has a gun), reveling in the visit of a bobcat, coming to “love the little particularities of things, their jags and curves and rough or silky textures, the exactly this that they present”—he quarries his father’s life, finding in it an enormous, nurturing good, even while the house he grew up in was one of drunkenness and anger. Then, too, his own life beckons, urging him to quit the fretting, “do what you're doing,” live the moment. Still, he’ll look long and hard at the path that has brought him to this juncture, his own strong and weak suits—the question of courage in all its ambiguity won’t go begging in these pages—that brought into being whatever resources of attention and creative association he now possesses.
Daniel’s time alone is potent, a dilation on the amusements and scorchings of the simple life, and a distillation of the strange, human group that was his family.Pub Date: May 31, 2005
ISBN: 1-59376-051-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
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.
