Lyrical and practical by turns, an apt portrait of a haunting landscape along with an ample variety of scientific views on...
A look at the Pole and, not incidentally, global warming, through the eyes of the author, the scientists and enthusiasts she interviews, and the journals of Victorian-era polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen.
As if to defy the legions of pioneering explorers determined to conquer it, the North Pole is, in fact, an icy sea. In 2002, author Brown journeyed to this non-place aboard the Russian nuclear vessel Yamal, a specially designed "ice breaker" capable of creating a route through the permanently frozen crust of the northernmost latitudes. In each chapter, Brown offers scenes from the voyage: seeing a polar bear, breaking the ice, watching the numbers on the GPS as they come ever closer to 90 degrees. Despite the exotic location, the voyage was essentially a tourist trip, a mostly safe adventure for polar dreamers. Then, switching gears, the author presents selections from Nansen's Farthest North, the journals of the explorer's expedition, originally published in 1897. Nansen is a gifted writer, and the log of his time on the Pole, the brutal conditions, and his relationship with his companion and his dogs, are transportive and gain even more punch when contrasted with Brown's descriptions of the luxuries of the Yamal's nuclear power (long, hot showers, for example). The third element here is comprised of interviews with the people Brown encountered on her trip and experts in the field of polar research. Many of these discussions focus on global warming, specifically its undeniability and complexity. There is also plenty of information about the indigenous people, wildlife, polar history, and daily life today in the northernmost human settlements. Equally fascinating and evocative are Brown's many photos of the land, ice and sea.
Lyrical and practical by turns, an apt portrait of a haunting landscape along with an ample variety of scientific views on the climate and ecology.Pub Date: June 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-891300-18-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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