If you’re a fan of UFOs and insane heat, this is your book.
Mojave Desert rat Layne veers between the occult and the pedestrian in this mixed bag of essays.
For a fan of arid lands, the author’s heart is in the right place: He celebrates a Mojave Desert ecosystem that, though heavily gnawed at the edges, is protected such that it’s the second largest desert wilderness in the world. “Out here, beyond the robotic grip of a civilization in disarray and despair, I promise you will feel human again, if only for a little while,” he writes in a neo-Thoreauvian vein. Layne celebrates neighbors who live in his clime within sight of the Joshua trees of southern California, some anti-social, some criminal, some reptilian in their worship of the sun. The author is a card-carrying believer in the eldritch, writing about the “Sierra Highway Devil,” a local emanation of the chupacabra; and the vast underground lakes that, miners swear, lie deep beneath the ancient beds of Death Valley. Layne also looks at the possibility of flying saucers (“When fighter jets were scrambled, the fast-moving objects vanished from the sky, only to return when the fighter jets landed for refueling”) and shows his appreciation for the late Art Bell, who broadcast outlandish theories about secret hangars where felled extraterrestrial aircraft have been stored. Bell’s radio show always aired late at night, when the listener would receive it in suitably eerie settings, “driving a deserted highway, or fighting insomnia, or working a graveyard shift under fluorescent lights.” It’s entertaining bunkum, though probably best for like-minded readers who buy assertions such as “our natural world functions as a supernatural habitat for an intelligence that has accompanied mankind since the beginning of our time.” Still, such oddities are at least more original than his past-sell-date notes on such desert icons as Edward Abbey and Charlie Manson.
If you’re a fan of UFOs and insane heat, this is your book.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-13968-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2020
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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