A low-key memoir of a thousand-mile camel trek across the Gobi desert in pre-WW II China, tracing not too diligently the steps of Genghis Khan—and complementing Tim Severin's In Search of Genghis Khan (1992). Just out of Yale at the height of the Depression, DeFrancis (Chinese/University of Hawaii; Visible Speech, 1989, etc.—not reviewed) went to Beijing to learn Chinese in order to get a job with Standard Oil (only belatedly did he discover that Standard Oil did its hiring in New York). The project suggested to DeFrancis in China by Canadian Desmond Martin (a Genghis Khan enthusiast and this book's photographer) was to be only a summer adventure, but the experience and the author's growing interest in the Chinese language were to determine his subsequent career. In a pace as leisurely as that of the camels he and Martin rode, DeFrancis describes with beguiling candor a journey that began at Guihua, where the travelers bought camels; continued north to the Temple of the Larks, gateway to territory ruled by the Mongols; crossed a thousand miles of the Gobi (``Gobi,'' DeFrancis tells us, means ``gravel'') to Suzhou; went down the old Silk Road to Lanzhou, where, to escape escalating tensions between Communists and local warlords, the pair took a raft down the Yellow River to Baotou; and returned by train to Beijing. Along the way, DeFrancis and Martin coped with recalcitrant camels; lived on tea and millet; endured temperatures of up to 140 degrees; visited Etsina, now an abandoned city, which Genghis Khan conquered and Marco Polo admired; saw the southern end of the Great Wall; and observed the death throes of old China as Communists, Japanese, and local warlords vied for control of these sparsely populated and inhospitable regions. As much a gently humorous jaunt as a keenly observed portrait of a place and people about to be devastated by war. (Seventy-eight illustrations, seven maps)
Pub Date: June 30, 1993
ISBN: 0-8248-1493-2
Page Count: 296
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
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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