A welcome (if doleful) debut.
An account of an unusual sojourn in the high desert of Oregon.
Dotted by little Mormon towns and vast cattle ranches, the Oregon outback might seem an unlikely place for a Hollywood hopeful. Yet, after doing hard time producing documentary films without making it big, Allen decided to follow a new love into the wild, taking up residence with him as caretakers of a rough-and-tumble ranch where “nearly everything mechanical or man-made . . . was either jerry-rigged or broken.” The author emerges in the course of her tale as a well-meaning but not particularly gifted tender of horses and hay fields—more of a Martha Stewart than a horse whisperer. Her memoir, though, is less about high-lonesome ranch life and its attendant hard work than about the hatreds and misunderstandings that seethe everywhere in the rural West between old-timers and counterculture newcomers. In the little town of Saints, Oregon, as she skillfully documents, those hatreds swirled around the vast complex called Rajneeshpuram, where followers of an Indian guru set themselves squarely at odds with locals who wore baseball caps emblazoned with slogans like “Official Wasco County Bigot.” This is an able work, tinged with humor (including a fart joke or two), but also possessed of a profound melancholy as the author considers the lives and deaths of misanthropic farmhands and Vietnam veterans, the sad disappearance of some rural ways and the welcome disappearance of others, and the loss of love. In her eyes, the high desert is a breathtakingly beautiful place, the people who live in it so unhurried that “a simple exchange of facts takes three times as long as it might in the city.” It is also a place of violence and sorrow, and (unlike other more celebratory books about the New West) not apt to inspire many readers to homestead in sagebrush country.
A welcome (if doleful) debut.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-58195-028-4
Page Count: 268
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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