A much-needed treatise on renewing our relationship with the natural world, though the lack of a singular narrative thread...
A memoir recounting a Native-American woman’s spiritual connection with the landscape of the American Southwest.
In her latest work, Laguna Pueblo tribeswoman Silko (Gardens in the Dunes, 1999, etc.) philosophizes on humankind’s place within the natural world. From her Tucson home, the author defends the predators that surround her, depicting rattlesnakes and bees as welcome neighbors rather than harmful intruders. In one instance, when trying to free a rattlesnake from chicken wire, she notes that it “never rattled at me once the whole time it was trapped.” Likewise, she later boasts that while plucking near-drowned bees from the water, “[t]hey never try to sting me,” proof enough for Silko that bees, too, “understand kindness.” The author invites readers to reflect on their own trespasses against nature, while simultaneously sounding the call for a renewed relationship between the natural world and humanity. Silko’s love for landscape is reminiscent of John Muir, and her fastidious account offers a clear, sonorous voice for her wilderness. Her connection with her surroundings transcends the living world, and she argues that nature actually functions as a spiritual go-between linking departed ancestors with living relatives. “After death, it may take some days for the spirit to bid farewell to this world and to the loved ones they want to reassure,” writes Silko, “so they visit us as birds or other wild creatures to let us know that they are in a good place not far away.” While the self-assured vignettes are impressive, the book lacks a central narrative. The author’s world is overflowing with turquoise, snakes, dogs and rain, yet all of these individual components fail to offer the reader a cohesive story.
A much-needed treatise on renewing our relationship with the natural world, though the lack of a singular narrative thread may restrict the work from reaching the audience it deserves.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-670-02211-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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