An ethnographic and historical prize from “that anthropological desideratum above all others—the native point of view.”
One shattered life in what was to become Arizona in the second half of the 19th century, on a personal scale and from a native perspective.
Burns started life as Hoomothya, aka Wet Nose, a child of one of the tribal branches gathered under the name Yavapai. In 1872, when he was about eight years old, his family was murdered at the Skeleton Cave Massacre, and Hoomothya was taken by Capt. James Burns, in whose home he fell somewhere between a ward and a servant, and renamed Mike Burns. This is the story of a swath of his life, though concentrating on the years 1872–1886, and told in his words. Aided by Bloomsbury Review and Encyclopaedia Britannica contributing editor McNamee’s (Aelian's On the Nature of Animals, 2011, etc.) light editorial touch, those words have an unfiltered, sand-blasted polish, spare and well-chosen and strung with piquant atmospherics and a decided sense of transport. “Burns lived in two worlds, and he was at home in neither,” writes McNamee, but he did spend many years as a scout for the United States military, where he took part in the push westward. There is plenty of mayhem and bloodshed, but what gives this memoir its peerless value is the potency and immediacy of the observations. This might be as quotidian as herding chickens, or as appalling as a man shot at such close range his clothes caught on fire, or as evocative as the place descriptions, moving camp, “following a big wash upstream toward the Superstition Mountains near the Gold Field.” Threaded throughout is the mistreatment and murder of native populations that Burns, despite being a scout, could or would hardly ignore.
An ethnographic and historical prize from “that anthropological desideratum above all others—the native point of view.”Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8165-0120-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Univ. of Arizona
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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