A brief but impressive debut collection.
A series of essays delicately evoking nature’s power and mystery.
Poet Mary Oliver provides the epigraph for essayist Rozema’s lyrical debut collection: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Like Oliver—and reminiscent also of Annie Dillard and Gretel Ehrlich—Rozema meditates on wildness, living, and dying; on spirituality, transcendence, and epiphany; and on music, friendship, and longing. The roads he followed traverse the Arizona canyons where he grew up; Seattle, where he landed in 1994, “somewhat lost, or somewhat free,” after his marriage ended; the Cascades in Washington; and the rugged terrain of Alaska, where he lived in his mid-20s. A self-proclaimed “agnostic to the core,” the author recalls that in high school, as a born-again Christian, he feared missing the rapture, “the name believers give to the extraordinary moment in which Christ would sweep his righteous followers up in the twinkling of an eye.” Searching for God, he was “driven to seminary by a kind of thirst,” but he lasted only a year. Disillusioned by the church, Rozema found sacred spaces in nature: on jagged mountain peaks, in the “redemptive wilderness,” on the open road. In a sacred place, the author writes, “I feel—simultaneously—my insignificance in the universe, and my centrality in it.” Spiritual sustenance, peace, and connection often seem elusive. “I would like to enter into the freedom that comes from losing the self,” writes the author. “I would like to be fully present in each moment…freed of regrets about the past and worries about the future.” Besides exploring the geology of land and archaeology of self, Rozema chronicles his father’s loss of memory from Alzheimer’s, which left the former math professor and choirmaster disoriented and bewildered. As he lay dying, the author sat by his bedside singing hymns and recounting family stories, witnessing the mysterious moment of death, when “time and space vanish.”
A brief but impressive debut collection.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59709-994-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Boreal/Red Hen Press
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
