May’s poetic, gleaming prose makes palpable the wildness and wind, freezing and thawing earth, delicate fragrances of grass...
In an impressive debut memoir, a self-proclaimed “Woman of the World” chronicles her journey to find a home.
May, who has worked as barista, conservationist, teacher and vegetable farmer, joins the ranks of Gretel Ehrlich and Annie Proulx, celebrants of sagebrush, big skies and journeys of self-discovery. The author grew up a traveler: Her parents moved frequently, and when asked where she came from, May would respond, proudly and defiantly, “I am from nowhere.” A move to the Gallatin River Valley of Montana with her fiance fed a new restlessness to discover a place she could call home and, even more importantly, to discover if rootlessness defined her. On 107 acres of land owned by her parents, the couple decided to build a yurt, a traditional Mongolian structure of bent wood covered with canvas, providing “a thin membrane” of shelter from owls, coyotes and a slinking mountain lion. They finished the painstaking project just before the snows began. Shrouded by the hushed winter landscape, May felt herself quieted, and she honed a new skill: “Learning silence in order to hear your own truth.” Instead of having no roots, she decided she, too, had been shaped by the places where she had lived —“a lineage of worldliness”—places essential to her identity that she did not need to travel constantly. While her friends wondered when she would take to the road with a new map, she settled into the tasks of day-to-day survival: planting, reaping, sweeping, cooking: “Some whole days,” she writes, “could be spent taking simple care.”
May’s poetic, gleaming prose makes palpable the wildness and wind, freezing and thawing earth, delicate fragrances of grass and budding trees—and her own profound transformation.Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-236-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
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
SEEN & HEARD
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