A slight book of reminiscence, seemingly meant for English majors who love the outdoors. Tallmadge (Literature and Environmental Studies/Union Institute Graduate School) charts his academic course from campus to campus, teaching and learning. In his telling, his career seems unremarkable (he was denied tenure, about which he writes at some length), although he clearly knows his subject, American nature writing, and emerges as a committed and engaging teacher. His ``teacher's path'' becomes considerably more interesting when it departs from campus and heads for the mountains. There, in the Wasatch, the Wind River, the Appalachians, the Sierra Nevada, and other ranges, Tallmadge affectingly describes his search for a place to call home, which, he eventually realizes, is ``not a place one finds, but a place one makes.'' Along the way, the author discusses books and authors like Henry David Thoreau (whom he idolizes), Edward Abbey (whom he does not), and other important players in what he calls the ``infinite game of reading.'' The book is at its best at self-critical moments, such as when Tallmadge examines our latter-day nature-loving spirit in the light of the idealism of the '60s, when his contemporaries ``saw in the wilderness, with its healthy and interdependent communities, a model for just and sustainable human societies''—but then scorned the uninitiated who did not share their budding Green sensibilities. This volume is at its worst when Tallmadge falls into sentimentalizing about ``the wisdom and beauty of the land'' and the teacher's role in ``healing both society and the earth.'' This suffers from not treating any one of its many subjects at quite enough length. The result is neither a book of personal essays as such, nor a vade mecum for teachers, nor even a book about nature strictly defined, but a glancing coming-of-age story that is of narrow interest.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-87480-530-9
Page Count: 218
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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
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