From out of the deep, deep wilds of Idaho comes this story of a short-story writer (The Tall Uncut, 1992)-turned-reluctant- backwoodsman. Fired up by the seemingly romantic life led by mountain men, Fromm accepted a position tending a stream full of salmon eggs in the Selway-Bitterroot wilderness. It was to be a stint of seven months, nearly all of them in the meanness of winter. But even before Fromm arrived at camp, he had second thoughts. This wasn't just backcountry, this was way backcountry, and he was grossly unprepared for all the boogies that swarmed down on him— loneliness, inexperience, the awesome interstellar cold, fear. Slowly coming to terms with his situation, the author beat back the demons by keeping busy and taking care not to concentrate too much on just what he had gotten himself into. This retelling of his foray into the wild is strangely compelling, considering its unassuming, understated character. Fromm catalogs his up-country days: settling in; looking after his stream; visiting with his few, far, and mostly absent neighbors; wrestling with his ambivalent feelings about the mountain-lion and bear hunts that figure so prominently in the region; taking long, therapeutic hikes that by and by surrendered the lay of the land to him. The author is sensitive enough to have enjoyed moonlight on snow and the eerie silence of the limitless cold, and, with tenderfoot luck, he witnessed an unexpected total eclipse of the sun, an event that sent him into a vital, whirling dance. Nothing outrageous happened, nothing beyond the pale, but his modest adventures reckoned up to a tale well worth the telling. It was a long haul for Fromm, a brute circumstance, full of tribulation. But he survived to write this fresh-faced account. Bully for him.
Pub Date: May 20, 1993
ISBN: 1-55821-205-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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