A detailed and generally fair-minded portrait of a man whose talents should have earned him a higher place in history, but...
The skipper of the HMS Beagle gets his own book at last.
Nichols (A Voyage for Madmen, 2001, etc.) picks up Robert Fitzroy in 1828, at age 23, as he’s taking command of the Beagle after its captain’s suicide. A handsome aristocrat with a scientific mind, Fitzroy was dispatched to chart the Straits of Magellan, a tough but potentially rewarding assignment. Events set him on a new course when natives of Tierra del Fuego stole one of his boats; in retaliation, Fitzroy took four hostages. When the thieves failed to restore the boat, Fitzroy decided to bring the captives to England to be civilized and Christianized, then sent home to convert their compatriots. For this return voyage in 1831, Darwin joined the ship as onboard naturalist and companion to Fitzroy, whose family history of mental illness made him fear for his sanity in the stressful environment of Cape Horn. Their relationship was stormy, but in the end the Beagle circumnavigated the globe and gave Darwin the data for his theory of evolution. Back in England, the fortunes of the two men diverged. Lauded at first for his accurate charts, Fitzroy was also tagged by the Admiralty as difficult; he soon found himself with few prospects, while Darwin's reputation was made. Appointed governor of New Zealand, Fitzroy pleased no one in his efforts to soothe tense native-settler relations and was fired. Finally, as head of the British government’s Meteorological Office, he designed weather stations and charts that made available for the first time the raw material for weather forecasting. It appears to have been the London Times’ decision to stop publishing his forecasts that led him in 1865 to succumb at last to the family malady and cut his own throat.
A detailed and generally fair-minded portrait of a man whose talents should have earned him a higher place in history, but whose shortcomings reduced him a footnote.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-008877-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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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