Vivid details and intelligent insights invigorate this celebration of the human spirit at work in unfamiliar places.
From the author/editor of several books about commercial fishing (Out on the Deep Blue, 2001, etc.), a more personal work chronicling her 23 summers spent pulling salmon from Alaskan waters.
Fields (English/Univ. of Alaska, Kodiak) balances the gritty details of this rigorous endeavor—check out the superb analysis of why a person’s hands are the precision tools of fishing—with an affirmation of life lessons learned along the way. Raised in New England, she attended college in Ohio, where she met husband Duncan, a native Alaskan from a fishing family. They were drawn together, she writes, “by a mutual love of philosophy and theology,” and this shared interest makes her memoir as much a chronicle of spiritual journey as a recollection of her life in fishing. Recollections of an impoverished childhood—she was one of six children abandoned by their father, who helped their mother restore old houses—alternate with accounts of her adult life. Fields describes the fishing seasons she worked, beginning as a newlywed in 1978, as well as journeys to Asia and to Africa made before she settled down to raise two children. Though strong, she found fishing daunting: the hours were long; the weather capricious; and the way of life tougher than she’d anticipated. (Scarce water supplies, for example, turned bathing and laundry into major chores.) She was close to Duncan’s family, but as the years passed she found the fishing season straining her marriage: there was no time to talk to her husband; and after the children were born, she feared medical emergencies (travel between their island and Kodiak, where the nearest doctors were, was always dangerous). But faith and her realization that life on the island was part of “the grace that sustains” have reconciled her to a choice she made all but unknowingly at age 20.
Vivid details and intelligent insights invigorate this celebration of the human spirit at work in unfamiliar places.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-29140-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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