This is travel literature as memoir, drolly covering the scope of a restless creative life.
An offbeat world tour with a not-quite-innocent abroad.
Novelist and essayist Freed (Emerita, English/Univ. of California; The Last Laugh, 2017, etc.) isn’t the type to get hung up on wondering “should I stay or should I go?” She gets the urge for going, and she’s gone. "As it happens," she writes, "I am at my most suggestible on the subject of belonging, because I am not much good at it." Wanderlust is what ties these funny and astute personal essays together; the book is about what it means to have an insatiable hunger for experience. Freed begins in, and frequently returns to, her homeland of South Africa, where she was born into a theatrical family amid the apartheid-era white bourgeoisie. She writes of the surface tension of revolt and how a mutual sense of distrust infects communication. A Zulu phrase book, for example, delivers commands with a Biblical tone, “intended to communicate to the servant that God is speaking.” Freed skewers an ecotourist camp where, she notes with a twinge of glee, a lioness devoured a camper. Maybe, she reasons, “had the lioness not lost her natural fear of Man while recovering from her capture experience, she might never have come anywhere near the camp.” In between visiting many countries over many years, Freed deals with love and mortality. There’s cancer, which transforms shopping: “I wonder whether I was drawn to soaps and gels because, unlike, say, a belt or a pair of shoes, they could be counted upon not to outlast me.” There’s infidelity: “I could not bear the thought of a life spent repeating itself in virtue.” And there is, finally, the clock ticking, as she considers how aging affects writing.
This is travel literature as memoir, drolly covering the scope of a restless creative life.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61902-927-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
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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