An often moving account of the ways we navigate our emotional and geographical landscapes.
A journalist and author from Johannesburg uses maps to retrace the boundaries of his boyhood, the dimensions of apartheid and the geography of imagination.
Gevisser, who has published previously about his native country (A Legacy of Liberation: Thabo Mbeki and the Future of the South African Dream, 2009, etc.) and wrote the script for the documentary The Man Who Drove with Mandela (1999), returns with an intimate journey through his life, a journey that took a wicked detour in January 2012 when he and two close friends suffered a brutal home invasion. The author begins with some brief pages about the event, mentions it again a few times in the ensuing narrative (it swims, sharklike, just below the surface of the text), then focuses on it in a 40-page section near the end. The author, who is Jewish and gay, writes affectingly about both these aspects of his life, but it was geography, initially, that consumed him as a boy. He loved to play a self-invented game called “Dispatcher,” in which he used a map book to imagine lives and journeys; he often played for hours per day. (The game returns in the final section of his text.) Gradually, Gevisser guides us through his life—his family, schooling, travels, love of books and writing, and his dawning awareness of his sexual orientation, apartheid and danger. He includes many maps and photographs, some of which sent him into library archives. He includes accounts of his interviews with people from all walks of Johannesburg life, including a woman who guided him through the township of Alexandra. The home-invasion section is wrenching to read—though the author had the resources to visit therapists and to get away into the mountains with his partner, whom he refers to only as “C.”
An often moving account of the ways we navigate our emotional and geographical landscapes.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-17676-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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