Fromm’s finely tuned reflections on this small but fully inhabited piece of the backwoods make this an adventure worth...
A middle-aged novelist and creative-writing teacher spends a month in the wilderness keeping an eye on baby fish for the National Forest Service and reliving his earlier experiences in the wild.
When Fromm (If Not for This, 2014, etc.) heard that he was a candidate to monitor the development of grayling eggs in the Bob Marshall Wilderness of Montana in May and June of 2004, he thought it would be a perfect opportunity to introduce his sons, then 9 and 6, to the wilderness he loves so much. The Forest Service, not surprisingly, vetoed this suggestion, so he ended up on his own, his only human contact brief radio calls to his supervisors a couple of times per week. Fromm had plenty of nonhuman company, however, as he made his daily 10-mile round trip on foot, often through the nearly freezing rain, to check on the progress of the fish. A herd of elk grazed in the field outside his cabin, coyotes howled in the mountains, and he caught more than one glimpse of grizzly and black bears as he made his way down the path. To make sure that they knew he was there, he loudly sang the songs that he used to put his boys to sleep, including “The Noble Duke of York” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain.” The author alternates lovingly observed scenes from the month in the mountains with equally vivid chapters about the time he spent in his early 20s as a river ranger. While physical danger plays a part in the story, with bear attacks always a possibility, the author keeps the emphasis on internal conflict as he tries to reconcile his longing to be with his boys with the love of solitude and nature he hasn’t been able to indulge so thoroughly for years.
Fromm’s finely tuned reflections on this small but fully inhabited piece of the backwoods make this an adventure worth savoring.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-10168-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
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
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