A neat piece of creative nonfiction. (Map, photos)
Poet Sheers, a descendant of his subject, lustrously re-creates the life of Reverend Arthur Cripps: poet, African missionary, thwarted father, a man about six leagues ahead of his European contemporaries.
Writing about “my great, great uncle . . . reflected through my imagination,” the author pays close attention to the surroundings: “the muezzin's call to pray, skittering across the sky from one of the minarets,” the coral-rag buildings of Zanzibar, the ruins of Arthur’s church, where he is buried with “a long key in the lock of his grave.” Sheers is a highly visual writer; impressions and meanings reveal themselves like the horizons of a dig. (“There were flecks of grey in his neatly-parted hair and Arthur thought again of the white brine on the black funnels, the signature of the storm.”) As the author seeks to take his relative’s measure, he finds plenty of storms: Arthur’s cherished, and pregnant, beloved’s father would not let them marry (“Think you can have your way with us, do you? Well, damn you, Mr. Cripps!”); he saw the grotesqueries of WWI as fought out in Africa; and he forever ran counter to the church and the colonial administration in the respect with which he treated the African people. Arthur opposed the hut tax and bitterly noted the “asymmetry of indulgence on behalf of the philanthropic nature of European settlement.” Ultimately he was hounded out of his official capacity, a man too appreciative of the Shona’s highly developed spiritual intelligence and the maturity of their belief system. But he returned as an independent missionary, an itinerant teacher, minister, and doctor. Sheers reveals Arthur to be a man in love with beauty, with Keats, with faith, and with the people among whom he lived and died.
A neat piece of creative nonfiction. (Map, photos)Pub Date: March 25, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-16464-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2004
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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