A further addition to the collective writings of that band of well-born European women who go out to Kenya, suffer personal tragedies, but find fulfillment and themselves in the demi-Edens they can afford to create. As a young girl, Italian-born Gallmann yearned to go to Africa: ``...it was a memory carried in my genes. That urge to fly home like swallows.'' Divorced, with a young son, and nearly crippled by a serious automobile accident, she first made a brief visit to Kenya at the age of 25. Three years later, Gallmann and her new husband, Paolo, a widower with two daughters, returned and purchased the enormous Ol Ari Nyro ranch on the edge of the great Rift Valley. A place of great beauty, it was also known for its ``abundance and variety of wildlife, mainly black rhino, elephant and buffalo.'' Here Kuki and Paolo spent idyllic days tracking elephants, hunting buffalos, and building a house. They vacationed on the Kenyan coast, where they fished; flew planes here and there at whim; and found amply time and help for frequent and abundant entertainment. But Gallmann was haunted by an impending sense of tragedy. In 1980, her beloved Paolo was killed in car crash; three years later, so Emanuelle died from snakebite. Devastated but resilient, Gallmann, with the help of people like Richard Leakey, decided to turn the ranch into a living memorial for her husband and son, dedicated to the preservation of the local plants and wildlife. Lots of game-watching, breathtaking sunsets, and loyal tribesmen-all the staples of the old African Raj are present, with a moving personal story thrown in as well. But the prose is overblown and the realities of current Africa ignored, leaving simply a diverting read for uncritical nostalgia buffs.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-83612-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1991
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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