“It is enough, it is plenty, to be a small parcel of Nature’s becoming,” writes Daniel. In this reflective and polished...
Poet, essayist, and memoirist Daniel (Looking After, 1996, etc.) charts his emergence as a writer and environmentalist.
Investigating his interest in and bright sympathy with the natural world, Daniel discovers glimmerings during his youth “in what were then the semirural outskirts of Washington, D.C.,” where he went fishing, observed the shivering mystery of a rumbling underground stream, and dodged hail the size of grapes. By high school, psychedelics were more his cup of tea, but he also went climbing up and down the West Coast. “It turned out that climbing, like fishing before it, had in a way prepared me for creative writing. . . . I knew what is was to labor in tense uncertainty, hoping that one move would lead me to the next.” His writing was helped along by Daniel’s study of Gary Snyder’s compact, tough, and focused poems, as well as Wallace Stegner’s grave, lively works about the western wilderness. Loren Eiseley gave Daniel a creation narrative he could accept. Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry taught him something about being a member of the living community. William Stafford counseled him to give “sustained attention to the promptings of language” and willingly follow where they lead. In Daniel’s case, they led to exploring the whole idea of home, in particular his home in western Oregon among the trees, berries, and incandescent green. Yet writing about nature can also divide him from it, he observes: “The problem may not be that language falsifies experience . . . but that to one extent or another language can come to replace experience.” Spending time outdoors is a counterweight, as is defense of the environment, though the author urges conservationists to “more forthrightly acknowledge our own implication in and insulation from natural resource economies.”
“It is enough, it is plenty, to be a small parcel of Nature’s becoming,” writes Daniel. In this reflective and polished text, he has very much insinuated himself into the process.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-57131-266-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
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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