Shepard’s mental energy is something to behold. He suggests more than once that “Those who know don’t talk / Those who talk...
A set of age pensées—complete with a CD arranging them to music—covering politics, music and living fully, from polymath publisher Shepard (The Reluctant Exhibitionist, 1994, etc.).
“What makes you think anyone would be interested in your opinions?” asks a friend of Shepard’s, and that’s a question that ought to be posed to any essayist. But there are a lot of things Shepard would like to get off his chest, and it’s rare that the unburdening doesn’t produce food for thought. Intimate, unrehearsed—Shepard recommends that readers take notice, asking them whether they’ve overstayed the interest and joy of their work, whether serenity—the ultimate prize of life, the Buddha state of mind—has gone begging? Shepard is here to tell them to take a risk, that money is no compensation for boredom, that one ought to pursue what’s personally meaningful, checking ego at the door, giving self-consciousness a holiday, taking aim at exploration and discovery despite all the inevitable missed notes. He is a student of his own medicine: he has run an elevator and squired a UPS truck; been defrocked as a psychoanalyst; experimented with drugs to unmoor his conventional thinking (and also lost a son to heroin). Shepard is a man of progressive politics, easily picking apart the war on drugs and the fatuous ravings of the Bush administration. As a partisan of compassionate, enlightened governing, he couldn’t have a better target than the war in Iraq and the flummery of the “Clean Skies,” “Job Creation” and “Save Our Forests” bills. He is wary of words, since so rarely can they get at the thrum of the matter; yet they can also be like a burr in the boot, irritating but demanding attention.
Shepard’s mental energy is something to behold. He suggests more than once that “Those who know don’t talk / Those who talk don’t know.” His words have an import worth considering.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-57962-117-1
Page Count: 142
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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