Well-written and well-paced, but may have limited appeal.
A memoir of two years in the life of a slightly muddled collegiate who sought clarity by traveling the world on a shoestring budget.
Like so many students nearing the end of their undergraduate studies, Friedman (Literature/John Jay Coll.) had no idea of what would come next. In an attempt to resolve her confusion, she set out for Ireland the summer before her senior year. Wheeling a massively overpacked red suitcase behind her, Friedman settled into a bohemian lifestyle of waitressing, bartending, drinking and dancing in Galway and beyond. An Australian housemate named Carly became the “wise life guide” who showed Friedman the virtues of traveling—and living—without a set plan. A year later, newly graduated from college and as unwilling as ever to settle down, the author gratefully accepted an invitation from Carly to visit her in Sydney. After living, working and traveling around Australia for a few months, Friedman and the ever-restless Carly headed to South America. The two “trapezed” their way across Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, negotiating dodgy accommodations, thieves, dangerous roadways, altitude sickness and food poisoning. Along the way, Friedman discovered that “people and places and experience” were far more important than possessions and that the present moment should be celebrated. Watching the narrator evolve from a fearful, immature young woman into a take-charge traveler is a pleasure, but the author’s insights tend toward the disappointingly banal.
Well-written and well-paced, but may have limited appeal.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-34337-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
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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