Occasionally smug, but attentive and well-composed.
The author of Composing a Life (1991) urges older readers to use their wisdom and energy to shape a further meaningful life and to engage with and contribute to society.
Bateson (Arabic Language Handbook, 2003, etc.), a visiting scholar at the Center on Aging and Work/Workplace Flexibility at Boston College, argues that the extension of the human life span in the past century does not mean an extension of old age but rather a longer period of adult life. Adding to psychoanalyst Erik Erikson’s eight life-cycle stages, she looks at a new period of extended vitality that she calls “Adulthood II,” an age of “active wisdom.” To explore the contributions of individuals in Adulthood II, Bateson recorded conversations with a variety of men and women who have reached this stage. Among them are a former Maine boat-yard worker turned jewelry maker in Arizona; an activist who founded several nonprofit organizations; a gay music teacher who works with autistic children; a retired cathedral dean who set up an interfaith center; and a white lawyer who started a journal of blacks in higher education. With Jane Fonda, the author discusses the relationship of age and spirituality, providing a portrait of the actress that contrasts sharply with the popular images of her as radical Vietnam war protester or beautiful exercise queen. The stories provide examples of people dealing with transitions in their lives, finding strategies to deal with new conditions and relationships, figuring who they are and what they want. The conversations, which have been largely crafted into essays, are not only lengthy but two-way, with Bateson including numerous details from her own interesting life. Her takeaway message is that the rich past experiences of those in Adulthood II can lead to the composition of a still-productive life and that older adults, now relatively free from daily responsibilities, can combine their wisdom with energy and commitment to have a positive effect on society.
Occasionally smug, but attentive and well-composed.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-307-26643-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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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