A thoughtful first book that should inspire others to lace up their running shoes and get moving.
A swift-moving lope across the continent, courtesy of runner and debut memoirist Álvarez.
Born in Washington state to Mexican immigrants, the author faced a future of working in a fruit warehouse with his parents, “my dreams of ever leaving Yakima ending here.” He adds, “I learned that I was poor, monolingual, and from a struggling family living the sort of day-to-day life that had no clear end in sight.” Escape came in the form of an invitation to take part in a run, organized by Native American activists, that would follow a course from Alaska to Panama, where the runners would meet other runners who had come north from Tierra del Fuego, all stopping at Native American communities along the way. It was a six-month commitment to a hard project conceived by a group called Peace and Dignity Journeys, born as an offshoot of César Chávez’s United Farm Workers. With names like Pacquiao, Trigger, and Chula Pepper, the mostly 30-something people Álvarez ran with were diligent and hardworking, though there were the inevitable personality clashes (“ ‘Whatever you do, stay away from that guy,’ Cheeto warns me. ‘Dude’s not well,’ he writes of one loose cannon). Almost everyone had traveled a hard path through addiction, poverty, and alienation. For his part, the author harbored a deep well of doubt about whether he could pull off so formidable a challenge, especially when he fell down while nearing the Mexican border and resolved not to appear too injured so as to be allowed to continue. Running, he discovered, has a positive, spirit-affirming dimension that he, who had always associated running with running away from someone or something, had not known before, giving an immediate connection to the land—and allowing him a part in a significant journey even as “the world that we had put on pause was beginning to move again.”
A thoughtful first book that should inspire others to lace up their running shoes and get moving.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-948226-46-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Catapult
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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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