Poignant recollections of a restless soul whose wanderings taught her that the desire for security, dignity and love...
In this memoir that blends poetry and prose, a humanitarian worker finds unlikely friendships and fleeting romances in some of the most violent, impoverished places on Earth.
This is an unconventional memoir, but Dargis (Seven Sonnets, 2012) hasn’t lived a conventional life. In a loosely stitched collection of reveries, she reflects on her years working for humanitarian causes, hopping from one war-torn nation to another seemingly as fast as a Land Rover can traverse a jungle road. Her adventures began in 1984 when she joined the Peace Corps and taught English in Morocco. Later, she traveled to Rwanda to oversee an international response organization following the 1994 genocide. What she encountered—primitive living conditions, ethnic brutality, staff members succumbing to AIDS—was in stark contrast to her Minnesota upbringing. A haunting sonnet entitled “Thy Neighbor’s Heart” captures the work of humanitarian groups in a strife-ridden land: “Truckloads of rightful wares to ease the plight / Of a million plus souls, with prayers, were sent.” While disease, conflict and death loom over the narrative, Dargis also shares insights into local customs and cuisines. In this way, the book is a travelogue born of nose-in-the-dirt experiences that wouldn’t be out of place in a Hemingway novel. Dargis witnessed tanks rolling across the Chadian desert, contracted malaria in Congo and ate gelato with a fortuneteller in Italy. One overarching truth emerges from a lifetime of travel: despite cultural differences, people are the same everywhere. Occasionally, a shortage of info, such as the names of organizations for which Dargis worked, makes it difficult to follow the timeline as she embarks on one perilous assignment after another. Ironically, it is the United States where the author struggles to fit in most. Always pulled toward the horizon, Dargis sees national borders as “invisible barriers” in a journey of self-discovery. In her story, the landscape changes quickly, but the human connections leave a lasting impression.
Poignant recollections of a restless soul whose wanderings taught her that the desire for security, dignity and love transcend the lines on a map.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1477644751
Page Count: 258
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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