A memoir that’s full of adventure but suffers from a general aimlessness.
A winding debut memoir about one man’s globe-trotting escapades.
Lang gives an impressively detailed, almost forensically specific first-person account of his ceaseless travels around the world. His story begins at age 16 with an apprenticeship to a plater in Wales, his birthplace, where he learned a trade and acquired an itch to roam. Off he went to South Africa, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Venezuela, Pakistan, France, China and many other exotic ports of call. The memoir rambles peripatetically through the author’s life, with some abiding themes; for example, he followed work wherever it led him and was incomprehensibly prone to terrifying accidents. In Wales, he accidentally caused the death of his father with a 9-inch grinding disk; a thrown bottle nearly cut off his thumb in South Africa; and he almost died in Saudi Arabia from ulcerated tonsillitis. He had several wives and girlfriends with whom he was destined to be disappointed: “At the time, my Spanish was practically nonexistent, and Carolina didn’t speak any English. To me it sounded like a perfect marriage because she couldn’t argue or complain about anything.” He also sought out increasingly ingenuous ways to avoid sobriety (such as growing marijuana and brewing his own spirits in a makeshift still). But most of all, he courted adventure, sometimes of strange varieties: He managed to have problematic encounters involving voodoo in both Venezuela and the Caribbean; in Kazakhstan, he fled the country to dodge a psychotically violent woman with ties to the KGB; and in Iran, he narrowly missed seeing a young couple executed in the street. His judgments, however, sometimes seem too casually dismissive: “Because it was my first time in Venezuela, I didn’t know that the vast majority of Venezuelans lie, have no respect, and never return money to foreigners.” Lang prefaces this remembrance with an entreaty to the reader to “forgive any spelling, punctuation or grammar mistakes you may find in my story.” There are, in fact, many mistakes, but they might have been forgiven more easily if they were surrounded by a purpose-driven narrative. Overall, it’s hard not to find something of interest in a book so full of risky exploits, but its lack of cohesion ultimately proves wearying.
A memoir that’s full of adventure but suffers from a general aimlessness.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4602-3007-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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