One man’s journey hiking the then-proposed path of the Keystone XL oil pipeline, from the Alberta tar sands of Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.
After a stint as a dishwasher at Deadhorse Camp, a makeshift community of oil workers near the Arctic Circle in northern Alaska, Ilgunas (Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom, 2013) realized that he was indirectly participating in the culture of oil dependence, and the subsequent industrial squalor he witnessed around him at camp, that he actively fought against. After a fateful if not disastrous hike to nearby Prudhoe Bay reinvigorated the author’s spirit for adventure and wanderlust, he quickly set about planning a symbolic trek along the proposed path of the contentious and, at the time, still-tentative Keystone XL oil pipeline. In 2012, he began in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, and continued southward for 1,700 miles through the plains of America to the Gulf coast of Texas. Along the way, the author, always following his free-wheeling philosophy (he has hitchhiked more than 10,000 miles across North America and canoed more than 1,000 in Canada), risked being shot by landowners for trespassing, battled niggling injuries and fatigue, and endured the harsh weather while sleeping outside. While rhapsodizing about the natural beauty of the environment, Ilgunas also injects his narrative with statistics, facts, and anecdotes about the global warming crisis (he quotes Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, James Hansen, and others). Ending his journey at a refinery on the Gulf coast in Port Arthur, Texas, the symbolism of the author’s journey does not add up to the gravitas that he intended. While the narrative is heartfelt and seemingly genuine, Ilgunas’ multistate hike reads like an overextended think piece.
An interesting and promising premise turns ponderous and occasionally preachy as the author narrates his cross-country trek.Pub Date: April 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-17548-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | NATURE
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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