An honest depiction of a courageous, difficult journey.
Mabee debuts with a touching memoir about a 21-year marriage that began with a most unusual purchase—a mountain in Albemarle County, Virginia.
In 1988, at the age of 40, Mabee, a Washington, D.C.–based lobbyist for nonprofit public health organizations, married a man named Timothy Bell. It was his second marriage and her first. For the next two decades, they worked together to build Tim’s business, a health care communications company, and shared a passion for the flora and fauna of their beloved retreat, Naked Mountain, which had a spectacular view of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The property, which spanned more than 283 acres, had no buildings on it; before they were able to build their house, they spent weekends there in a camper parked in a clearing. Meanwhile, Mabee gradually began cataloging and detailing the incredible variety of native plants and avian life that called Naked Mountain home. In 2006, she and her husband signed a conservation easement contract that made their property “the forty-ninth natural area preserve in the state of Virginia,” protecting it in perpetuity. When Mabee was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, it inspired her to begin writing the story of “how two…nature-ignorant suburban Washington professionals bought a mountain in central Virginia.” But just as she had her final treatment for her cancer, which went into remission, Tim was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The latter portion of the book deals with her grief over losing him and her determination to move forward in a new relationship. Mabee’s smooth, skillful prose is vivid throughout, whether she’s describing the physical beauty of Naked Mountain (“Gradually rising soft blue peaks, complexly layered and rounded by millions of years of erosion, roll like massive ocean waves”) or the multiple, grueling surgeries that she endured on the way to recovery, which are not for the queasy. The volume is also filled with a wealth of intriguing ecological information (such as the fact that monarch butterflies, which stopped at the mountain on their annual migration, were being poisoned by pesticides) and geological history of the area. The author occasionally wanders too far into the botanical weeds in these sections, but overall, the narrative remains intensely personal and compelling.
An honest depiction of a courageous, difficult journey.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63152-097-6
Page Count: 221
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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