An entertaining, disorganized, and inspiring jaunt, the chief value of which is its message to readers: Reach for the stars.
A brief, engaging, sometimes scintillating ramble around the cosmos with Tyson (Astrophysics/Princeton; dir., Hayden
Planetarium), who shares his perspectives and experiences as an African-American astrophysicist. From the rooftop of his Bronx apartment building, the nine year-old Tyson could see enough of the night sky to become curious about it. However, it was only after a trip to the sky theater of the Hayden Planetarium, which portrayed many more stars than he could see from his rooftop, that he decided to become an astrophysicist. He tells how he purchased a powerful telescope that enabled him to see the planets close up (including his favorite, Saturn). Later, at an astronomy camp in California, he saw for the first time "bezillions" of stars in a sky that resembled that of the Planetarium theater. Tyson describes his experiences as a student at the Bronx High School of Science, Harvard, the University of Texas, and Columbia, makes an eloquent plea for increased scientific literacy, and reflects wryly on his side career as a commentator on astronomy for national television. He also depicts the burdens he's borne (and bears even now) as an African-American: routine questionings at the hands of the police, for instance, and expressions of doubt over his intellectual abilities from strangers (and even colleagues). His conclusion: "You can be ridden only if your back is bent." He comments entertainingly on physics equations and the scientific method, speculates ominously on the prospect—nearly certain, to his mind—of cataclysmic collisions between the Earth and high-velocity comets or asteroids, and ruminates inconclusively on the search for God in the infinitude of space.
An entertaining, disorganized, and inspiring jaunt, the chief value of which is its message to readers: Reach for the stars.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-48838-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
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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