An intriguing adventure story that often doesn’t ring true. Caveat emptor.
The improbable story of how Chapman was kidnapped from her rural Colombian village at the age of 5 and abandoned in the jungle.
According to the tale, pieced together by her daughter, Vanessa James, Chapman adopted monkey ways—eating what they ate, climbing trees and mimicking their calls—until five years later, when she connected with some hunters in the hopes of being returned to her family. Instead, she was left in a brothel on the outskirts of the nearby city. There she was kept in semislavery as a house servant. Gradually, she relearned Spanish and the rudiments of civilized life. Escaping, she fell in with other homeless children and was ultimately taken in by a brutal Mafia family, where she was again reduced to servitude. The book ends when the author, around the age of 14, was rescued by a neighbor's daughter, who offered her a real home in another town. Although ostensibly written as a first-person account by Chapman, the preface by James and the epilogue by novelist Barrett-Lee (One Day, Someday, 2003, etc.) provide a different picture. James explains how she was intrigued by her mother's stories about life among the monkeys and also by the oddity of her own upbringing—for example, having to sit and howl at her mother's feet before being fed. She decided “to piece together mum's tangled memories” about the “magical world” living in the jungle with a tribe of monkeys and the life of a Colombian street child, characterized by “kidnappings, abductions, drugs, crime, murder and child abuse.” Barrett-Lee admits that she was given “a huge, unwieldy document” to work with, which she then scripted.
An intriguing adventure story that often doesn’t ring true. Caveat emptor.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1605984742
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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