Call it dull on ice.
A grinding memoir of life in the Alaskan wild.
Joining forces with practiced as-told-to author Sasser, Cobb relates her adventures as Alaska’s last homesteader (that is, the recipient of free government land in exchange for a guarantee to settle on and improve it). Her adventures are various, sometimes terrifying, and unfailingly predictable. Most readers already have an idea that Alaska is a wild, cold, beautiful place full of bears and other dangerous critters, and reading Cobb’s book will add little to that store of information: it’s full of pesky bears, all right, who steal the homesteaders’ food and poop all over their belongings, and it’s also full of majestic mountains and towering trees. That much said, the author treats us to sentimental nothings such as this: “In his eyes already appeared the faraway Alaska look. Wolves and grizzlies had that look. Les said it came from gazing into free and wild places where a man could be a man.” The narrative picks up force here and there when Cobb and company get down to describing in detail how men act like men in the frozen North (i.e., often badly and often ineptly). In one memorable scene, Cobb’s husband, who turns out to be a risky and moody partner, faces down a psychopathic bully of a neighbor Old West–style, ready to draw a pistol and square things up; in another, he courts a jail sentence by selling unlicensed booze to oil-camp workers; in still another, he disappears without a word, leaving his family to fend for itself. Still, everything turns out all right for the Cobbs in the end, after Norma finds fulfillment in sled-dog mushing and home-schooling and her husband discovers gold, mercifully bringing this tale to its close.
Call it dull on ice.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-26198-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
