Perhaps the best reader for this book is someone who wants to hike that same trail and is willing to risk being talked out...
A writer, editor, and “inveterate walker” chronicles his monthlong hike in the Alps.
In his first book, Arlan follows the literary path that others have blazed, to great popular success, though he has taken a different route, both geographically and thematically. “Everyone back home knows the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, the John Muir Trail,” he writes. “But so few seem to have heard of the Grand Traverse of the Alps….There was something untouched about it that I liked, so I treated it preciously, like a secret.” This alone must have seemed like a good enough reason to undertake the trek and to write a book about it. However, there is little sense of true purpose in this account: no spiritual illumination, no sudden epiphanies, no meditative insight, no transformation—at least none that occurred during the hike or the writing about it. Toward the end, Arlan told a traveler, “I’ve been walking for over three weeks. Not every day, but almost. From Geneva.” When asked why, he responds, “The longer I walk the harder it is to answer the question.” Readers who have encountered such literary journeys will likely knows what happens: the author sacrifices some financial security; he encounters strangers, some of whom are kind; he gets lost; he is more tired than he has ever been; it rains a lot; he survives a dangerous fall. By the time he finished both his journey and his book, he changed a bit, discovering some stamina and inner resources he never knew he possessed. “I am a quitter by nature,” he insists, though the evidence suggests the contrary. “I don’t like pain the way some people do. I have no interest in ‘pushing myself,’ in ‘broadening my horizons’….The path of least resistance has always been my favorite path. So, again, I wonder: what was I doing here?”
Perhaps the best reader for this book is someone who wants to hike that same trail and is willing to risk being talked out of it.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5107-0975-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
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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