This personal collection of tales, yarns and folklore may not be enough to cure readers’ wanderlust, but it does provide a...
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Caputo (Crossers, 2009, etc.) chronicles his journey with a vintage Airstream trailer from the southernmost point of the United States to the northernmost reachable point in Deadhorse, Ala., in hopes of discovering what keeps this country united.
Whether he’s panning for gold in the Arctic Circle campground, taking pictures of buffalo in Theodore Roosevelt National Park or riding gaited horses through the Meramec Valley, one thing’s for certain: This reporter has more stamina in him than your average 21-year-old. A few months shy of his 70th birthday, Caputo became re-inspired to discover America by driving cross-country (accompanied by his wife and dogs). In this hybrid memoir/history lesson, Caputo muses on such topics as immigration, foreclosure, and the pros and cons of technology’s influence when traveling (“when [it] was in GPS mode, [the android phone] removed the elements of unpredictability that made travel an adventure”). In the strongest sections, the author records his conversations with both tourists and townsmen—though the historical footnotes often distract from the primary narrative. From chatting with West Virginia missionaries in Key West, to volunteering with the Red Cross in tornado-ravaged Tuscaloosa, to bartering his lawn-mowing services in exchange for room and board on a Meramec Valley horse farm, Caputo creates captivating portraits of a wide variety of communities. His most gripping discussions include his interviews with couples that were forced to downsize, teens that would rather work the land than work online (“you hear more about Lindsay Lohan than you do about crop prices”), and restaurant owners struggling to survive in obsolete towns. Although Caputo doesn’t stumble upon a shared consensus from all his interviewees, he eventually learns that America thrives on both optimism and second chances.
This personal collection of tales, yarns and folklore may not be enough to cure readers’ wanderlust, but it does provide a diverse and acutely observed portrait of our country.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9446-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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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