A sometimes poignant but ultimately banal memoir that simultaneously essentializes American Indians and has nothing to do with them. Baughman, a freelance writer who contributes to Field and Stream and other publications, is a distant relation of Joseph Brant, a renowned Mohawk statesman of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Baughman claims that Brant is one of the two most important people in this book, though readers learn very little about him and his name is, in fact, barely mentioned. The other key personality in the volume is the author's grandfather, John Brant, who taught Baughman as a boy about the famous chief. The ten chapters of the volume are loosely linked ruminations by Baughman on his own life as it relates to that of his grandfather, a small Pennsylvania farmer who taught his grandson about the woods, nature, and life. When teaching the young Baughman to shoot and hunt, this grandfather tells him that it is in his ``blood.'' Small incidents, like the family dog getting into a scrap with a porcupine, are presented in affectionate detail. Baughman tells of portraying an Indian in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. He also relates his travels to numerous reservations, the only places, he claims, where ``real'' Indians can live together and which, paradoxically, according to the author, almost all the residents want to leave. Modern-day Indian dysfunctionality and misery are dwelt upon as a means of looking back elegiacally on a sepia-toned past. The volume ends with Baughman's lament for the ``purity of Mohawk life,'' whose doom was sealed 200 years ago, and his passing on of his Mohawk blood to his children, thus completing the circle of his own life. Pretentious and riddled with inaccuracies, the book is best viewed as Baughman living out the ultimate white colonial fantasy- -playing Indian.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55821-376-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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