While her stories are moving and the scenery is as beautifully caught as with a camera, Sovich reaches for spiritual life...
Journalist Sovich’s first book details her travels to Africa in search of adventure.
The author’s story—though not the book—begins with her childhood with a mother who traveled, Sovich believed, to escape her suburban Connecticut life. When the author found herself living in Paris with her husband, working a hated job and uncomfortable with her role, she decided to follow in her mother’s footsteps. Instead of a short getaway, her trip to Africa was a desperate attempt to reconnect to her youth and be transformed into someone else. That trip was the first of three that make up this memoir. While spending as little money as possible and traveling rapidly, she often put herself in significant danger and missed what she went to experience. When Sovich decided to fly home midjourney, her husband labeled her travel style perfectly: martyrdom. He also told her to return to Africa and make her trip to Timbuktu the right way, and she listened. With experience to guide her, Sovich set out to experience the road to Timbuktu in an open, engaged way. Her descriptions of the West African countries she visited are engrossing. She captures a welcoming and friendly attitude she missed on her first trip and paints a picture of immersing herself in the lives of the people around her. Unfortunately, many of the lessons Sovich claimed to have learned don’t stick during the second trip, making her sound somewhat immature. The third trip feels confusing and unnecessary, with little to add to the narrative. Her aha-moment, supposedly reached with new insight from her travels, is described in so little detail that it seems incongruous and ill-considered rather than inspired and enlightened.
While her stories are moving and the scenery is as beautifully caught as with a camera, Sovich reaches for spiritual life lessons that fail to ring true.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-02595-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
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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